TGIF! We both had online class today, Grant talked to his sis this morning on Skype, “cookie lady” came through again with a brownie delivery (sent from her apartment on the second floor to the property manager in the lobby to us on the tenth floor), and Grant made goulash for dinner.

Images from Alison’s online class – DNA extraction from strawberries! Students were engaged and excited to try the lab at home – it is quite easy to do with materials found around the house!

Day 6 here in the apartment quarantine and all this went down –

1. You call your sister for the BeachBody workout and this is what you get:

2. Skyping Hil a.k.a. muffin tin, and seeing sweet Gus River 🙂

3. DNA extraction of strawberries 🙂 This is prepping for online class time tomorrow when I will show my students this lab demo. Please note the “reuse” of many items previously witnessed from an earlier post.

4. “Scarlett’s pasta” from the movie Chef – made by the best chef in the world, Grant

5. While the victories seem to outweigh the challenges, we cannot deny some points of stress/hardships along the way. This morning, an HR personnel from our school helped Alison to get some Starbucks coffee delivered to the house.

However, this was followed by some negative comments from the property manager. We are 100% dependent on the workers in this apartment complex to bring us EVERYTHING that we have delivered to the lobby (did we mention that we aren’t allowed to leave the apartment?). They are overwhelmed with the amount of deliveries they have to make, as shown in this dialogue below.

Three themes for today:

1. “Workouts without borders” – Sarah skyped me in for her workout so I could join along. Grant has been cycling on the indoor bike each day, and I have been doing a variety of cycling/online videos/ZUMBA to keep active.
2. Work
3. General Tsao’s chicken from scratch – believe me, it IS as good as it looks!

Skype calls with family and friends back home are, more than ever, SO important and appreciated. I told my mom we ordered some apples but that we were being cautious to eat raw foods so soon to arriving back in Qingdao. She suggested I make applesauce. Applesauce and latkes were the breakfast choices this morning 🙂

Work time was in full swing as well today…

This morning, our school’s DR department delivered some materials to keep us healthy and safe. We are loving this Chinglish (word that seems to translate from Chinese to English but misses the mark by a bit) word on the side of the alcohol disinfectant. This “vodka” actually came in handy to clean around the house.

For dinner, we decided to order some pizza. We weren’t sure if it would work because we had heard that the “kangaroo people” (delivery guys on motorcycles) might be hard to find due to the virus. Here is Grant placing the order:

Once we placed the order, it took a couple minutes, but then a kangaroo guy was assigned to pick up the pizza. Once it arrived, we had to tell the property manager to bring it up. They were a bit swamped with many quarantines and deliveries around dinner time, but, 40 minutes later, we had a knock at the door indicating our delivery had made it up to our floor.

DAY 2 AT THE RANCH

We caught up on some work (document camera for making videos featured below), puttered (that’s a Cindy word for sure) around the house doing laundry and cleaning, and Grant made some BOMB chilli.

I am writing this blog post for two chief reasons:

1. I have A LOT of time on my hands. Read on to understand why. This is more to keep my sanity than for your reading purposes 🙂
2. I feel that the world outside China should have an example of an on-the-ground couple and their experiences – challenges and victories. The media is known for painting pictures of global events – whether true or not. By reading these subsequent posts, I hope you will have more information to make a personalized/educated opinion about the current coronavirus situation and how it affects us living in Qingdao, China.

Upon buying our tickets from Auckland-to-Shanghai-to-Qingdao, we were most anxious about a horror story a fellow ex-pat shared with us – a Seoul-Qingdao flight had arrived and all its passengers were quarantined under government supervision in a nearby hotel. This is the NOT the outcome we wanted (we wanted to be *home* in our Q-city apartment). We flew anxiously hoping that this would not be our fate.

We arrived to a deserted Shanghai airport early Saturday morning. Prior to departing the plane, the overhead requested that everyone take their seats for the medical officer to board. I have never seen people sit down so quickly. A couple of Chinese girls were screened by the fullbody-hazmat women, but nothing further.

In the Shanghai airport, everyone was wearing a mask/goggles/face shield/all three and kept distance from each other. In the Shanghai airport, I joked with Laura via Skype: “Wow! A much-needed behavior change experienced in Shanghai – people are actually giving each other the bubble they need!” Despite our full-knowledge that medical masks do little to prevent a viral infection (they aren’t a tight seal, duh. If you are breathing, particles are getting in the sides), we wore them to avert strange looks. Here are some Shanghai airport pics:

We arrived back to TAO/Qingdao; to the part of the journey we were most anxious about. We walked RIGHT by the international arrivals gate (consciously keeping our heads down); where medical officers were wearing full hazmat suits, carefully screening arrivals, and loading buses going…somewhere. We walked downstairs and took a taxi back to our apartment. At this point, we let out a deep breath. We had avoided the worst-possible scenario.

In our apartment complex, our temperatures were taken and we wrote on names on the sign-on sign-out sheet. We thought we were clear, until…we were told we needed to do a 14-day mandatory quarantine in our apartments. We spoke with the property manager extensively explaining that we had been to a “safe zone” in NZ and Shanghai, not Wuhan/Hubei province. She got someone on the phone and sent us on our way to the elevators, but messaged us within 5 minutes – we were to do a 14-day mandatory quarantine in our homes.

Panic/depression/sadness set in quickly, and we took a few minutes to process what was happening. We came to grips with the situation in different ways, but both agreed to do the quarantine and get it “over with” – we couldn’t avoid the unavoidable.

We began frantically messaging HR at our school – How do we get water? Groceries? We actually can’t leave for two weeks? What about other things that we need? Are people allowed to visit us? Temperature readings; what’s this about? Between HR and the property manager in our building, everything got sorted. Now, it’s just us and filling our time for 14 days.

The following will be the chronicle of how we have maintained sanity and filled our time in these 14 days. We are children in this apartment building; 100% dependent on the property manager to deliver items from the lobby downstairs up to us.

DAY 1 QUARANTINE – a small but necessary victory

As mentioned in the previous post, we intended to be in NZ for two weeks to see the major sites. However, we ended up in NZ a total of 6 weeks due to the progression of coronavirus in China. Remember, during this time, we are doing online teaching via several platforms and communicating with students on a regular basis in hopes of keeping on track with the curriculum. We each had a phone and shared an iPad to complete daily tasks. There was a daily “fight” for the iPad, but the materials we most needed were back on our hard drives/laptops in Qingdao. A “working holiday” simply became “working and living,” but we did our best to try and achieve a healthy work-life balance.

Week 3 – By this time, Tom-o (Charlotte’s partner-in-crime) had arrived in NZ after hearing the news that we weren’t returning to school for an unknown amount of time. Grant and I rented a car and (by the good graces of Charlotte’s family) borrowed a tent, air mattress, and sleeping bag for some camping up in the Northland. We based ourselves in Kerikeri and took day-trips to epic sights:

Waitangi Day on February 6. This day celebrates the Treaty of Waitangi, and exhibits aspects of traditional Maori culture such as the haka and canoes (waka).

Tane Mahuta and Puketi Forest

Sand dunes and Cape Reinga

Russell Island

Week 4 – Whakatane, Marton and Wellington

At the start of this week, Ali completed the Tarawera half-marathon. Here is the finish line:

Again, by the generosity and unfaltering chivalry of Charlotte Morris’ family, we spent the next week primarily in Whakatane and Marton. The Whakatane homestead of Charlotte’s parents is situated on a dairy farm and the Marton home (Charlotte’s older sister and husband) is on a sheep/beef farm. Between online learning work sessions, we were grateful for the tour of the Marton land to learn about sheep farming and see how they are coping with the current drought.

Tom, Charlotte, Grant, and I spent a couple additional days in the south of the North Island in Wellington. This is a “sweet-as” city featuring the sites of Weta workshop, Cuba street epic diners, and Te Papa museum.

Week 5 – Grant and I rented another car and over to Raglan for the week. We stayed in a great Airbnb, cooked some awesome dishes with ingredients we’ve been missing in China for the past 1.5 years, and continued online learning. The much-missed routine and schedule were achieved with work in the early morning, a break at lunch to call friends/fam back in VT, and then work again in the late afternoon when our students were awake in China (-5 hours from NZ). We got out to see some of the Raglan highlights – The Wharf, Bridal falls, and Manu Bay, a famous surfing spot.

Week 6 – We worked and lived in Whakatane. We achieved routine and schedule, but still felt the “pull” of our long-lost laptops/hard drives in Qingdao. We were able to do work and maintain baseline requirements for online teaching in NZ, but not to the degree that we expect from ourselves as professionals. After many long talks/debates, Grant and I decided to return to China. We expected that there would be a quarantine/other precautions, but we were willing to accept those in exchange for being *home*. Regardless of the situation in Qingdao, it is still our current home.

A few parting words to N.Zed.:

We will be back! Thank you for the crystal blue skies, “no way thanks”, red wine dealt by Gary, sweet words from Rosemary, an average AQI of 5, and the best hospitality the world has ever seen. Thank to you all who helped make our trip so memorable. A special thank you to Morris family. You were incredible hosts and we can’t thank you enough for tolerating us for weeks longer than you intended to. We love you and miss you already, but we will see you again soon. Until then….

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” -A. A. Milne

“Don’t be dismayed by good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.”
–Richard Bach