Day 40. Or 50. I've lost count. This entry is going to be pretty text heavy, and a bit dry. This is definitely a "for me" blog that I won't post on FB, because it is "not interesting" and "is the ranting of someone stuck inside for over a month". 

So, what have I been doing? Not so much, as you'd expect. My day is pretty chill. I get to wake up whenever I want without an alarm (loving that). In the morning and afternoon, I teach my two, 40 minute lessons per day. And many days, we get to go outside to line up and get a stick in my mouth for a COVID test (we've done probably over 20 so far). The rest of the time I fill with Reddit, Youtube, video games (a lot of those - I'm going through the entire Tales series, and I'm up to the PS3 era). Of course, cooking has been happening. My stir fry game is getting up there. I also made a pretty good frittata, and a curry potato pie. Ella made a restaurant-level sweet and sour pork, so we're certainly eating (and drinking) pretty well. Oh, I've also started playing piano.

Actually, I have a lot to say about that, so before I get into my thoughts on the situation in Shanghai, let me get that off my chest. If you'd like to skip ahead, and I recommend you do, I will indicate the end below:

Right, piano. I'm sure this will make my parents happy, at least. They pushed me to learn it well, 30 some years ago. And honestly, I hated it. So, why now? I'm not really sure actually. I suppose because Ella started learning ukulele, and she thought it would be fun if we could play together. But honestly, I'm not really a music person. It has been years since I've opened the music player app on my phone for anything but podcasts. But I guess I picked piano instead of something else because of similar reasons my parents used when I was a kid - it's like a big video game controller. I always found the non-binary nature of guitars and wind instruments really frustrating. Yeah I know the notes will be the same if you're good, but that just seemed like an unnecessary hurdle. Plus I wanted an instrument I could either A) find everywhere, or B) carry. That was my thought process to buy a harmonica years ago (no idea where that is), but I found that hard to play and kind of gross. So, piano it is. I picked up a keyboard for about $10 online, and yeah, it's not great. But it's fine for me.

How then, do I learn this thing? I approached it the same way I teach language, oddly enough - set a goal, and work backwards from there. My long term goal is that I want to see sheet music of songs I like, and be able to play that. Apparently this is an unusual goal, because every tutorial absolutely, positively, suuuucks at teaching you this. It's amazing pianos still exist in the world, as I assume every student would have smashed them in frustration. It reminds me of the very outdated ways of teaching a language, like Grammar Translation (i.e. the way you probably learned in High School, like I did with German). Endless drills, memorization of rules, and other tasks while some taskmaster says "You are not allowed to do that thing you want yet." And consequently, I remember very little of German.

So for my first lesson, I wanted to play the first bit of the Mario theme. That's all. I didn't care about my finger placement, or what the "right" way to do things was. And when you throw all those silly per-requisites away, it only takes like 5 minutes to do. And that was motivating. Motivating enough to play more and add more songs. By now I'm able to do the treble clef fairly competently. I only use 4 fingers (I guess I have a short thumb? It's really uncomfortable), I don't know the difference between the types of notes, but it doesn't matter. I'm doing things I actually want to do.

So now I have to think, how does piano instruction suck so much? Is it because that people just teach the same way they were taught? If so, what a waste. Surely there were things about your instruction you found difficult or disliked. Why wouldn't you want to improve on that? Or maybe I'm being too cynical, and there are plenty of piano instructors that do the "set a goal and work back" approach. All I can say is that if they were around as a kid, and the words "must", "rules", and "correct" were not in their vocabulary, I may have stuck with piano. For now, I think I'm partially learning in order to play with Ella, and partially out of pure spite for every stuck up tutorial out there.

====END OF PIANO RANT====

I guess I had a lot to say about piano.

I remember back when Ella and I were in Bali, we got hit by an earthquake. In truth, it was incredibly minor. It definitely was not minor the next island over, but I guess because Bali is a well-known place with lots of foreigners, it get a lot of attention on the US news. However, I feel the attention it got was really overblown and very clickbaity. People saying how scary it was, how things were shaking, etc.. Yeah, I mean, it is an earthquake. Things shake. But the whole thing was 10 seconds and was not at all severe. This has sort of colored my opinion of mainstream US news that they care more about views than being objective. It is my impression, although I cannot confirm, that is how they approached the situation in Shanghai.

And I'm sort of in between a rock and a hard place, here. The official state news will of course say everything is great. However, foreign news will say everything is terrible. And what I don't see is anyone in the middle. In truth, we are fine. We've always been fine. If it was the apocalypse like western news says, I feel I would have noticed. I mean, try to have 25 million people pull in the same direction? Good luck, with that. There will always be people who do not agree and fight back. I would like to see stories that are a mix of "Hey, these people are chilling on their balcony, but these people are struggling to pay rent." I guess because "everything is fine here" is not exciting news, but it also is informative, which is what I want. I just wish there were more of me.

But really, Ella and I have been okay through this whole ordeal. Early on we were a bit low on food, but instead of trying to do it ourselves we joined the community group orders. Now, along with government handouts, our biggest problem is eating the food we have before it goes bad. We've literally been giving it away boxes of food to neighbors with larger families. The only real struggle now is the mental one. Fortunately we're both pretty introverted, and have been more or less fine. Early on we'd get bummed for a day or so, but it rarely lasted. We'd occasionally get on each others nerves, but we would both talk about it and work things out. We're really quite used to it by now, and I think I could tolerate it for longer - not that I'd want to be any means, dear god let me go to a bar. However, I don't know how this all ends. I get COVID is dangerous, but is a lockdown this long the solution? There has to be a cost-benefit analysis, and I am not sure where things lie. Regardless, I think this will change Shanghai, for sure. Some 80% of foreigners, according to polls, say they're going to leave after this. I mean, asking people in lockdown "do you want to leave?" is going to skew the results for sure, but even if a fraction follow through it will feel like a different city. On the one hand, as a foreigner I'll be an even more rare commodity, which is not nothing for the salary. On the other, the idea of another lockdown is a hard sell. While this time has been tolerable, it has not been enjoyable. I am certainly not in the right state of mind to decide this now, but if China is going to stay hitched to the "zero covid" train, we need to consider if we want to get off at the next station.

Well hey there!

Sorry, I'm not talking to you, internet person. I'm talking to my new friend, pencil. Pencil is great. We hang out all the time! We eat together, play together, and sometimes we even have slumber parties. Of course, all of this is right here in my apartment, because I haven't been able to leave for 3 weeks. 

But yeah, everything is great. I'm great, everything is great great super great. Hahaha ha ha... ha ha!

Our government care package. Nice!

Okay for serious, if you have not seen the news, Shanghai is in full wartime mode against the latest COVID surge. As the official story goes, a quarantine hotel for new arrivals was not being managed that well. The virus got out, and because pretty much everyone is vaccinated, there were a lot of asymptomatic people spreading it around. So a couple weeks later, it was "Ah crap, it's everywhere." Sort of like when your sink is leaking, by the time you find out you're pretty much screwed. Shanghai started by doing grid testing, where they close off say, 4 city blocks, and just test everyone in that area. If they find a case, they take that person to central quarantine, and then everyone else has to stay put until they're sure there are no more cases. Rinse and repeat. We have been in the cycle where lockdown is almost over, then someone somewhere has a case, asymptomatic or not, and the clock resets.

Pictured: People who do not complain

After two weeks, we were finally, finally scheduled to get out. But then, SH decided that it wasn't being squashed fast enough, so they locked down the whole city for a week. So, bad luck for our part, and I'm sure several others. Still, when people complain "Ugh, we have to stay inside for 5 days!" I can't help but play the worlds smallest violin, as we have been stuck inside for... well, three weeks exactly today. Still, they are masters at coordinating, because they decided they will test the whole city, some 25 million people, today. As in one day. And they will absolutely do it. We just did ours, and after we got called, we stood in line for maybe 5 minutes. Now, maybe we're lucky. But, speaking of complaining, expats have been in rare form lately. Like someone saying that foreigners get no respect in this country, while standing in the same line with everyone else. Or, see the photo of the government care package? It was actually quite nice, and a surprise to boot. It even contained a nice letter thanking everyone for their patience, and that we'll get through this together. Aww. Nah, people complained endlessly about it, like "OH GOD, this food is disgusting." for... not being free-range organic or something, I don't know. It's food. You had weeks to stock up if you wanted something different.

Locked down? Let the veggies come to you.

So, this is where people from the US have their minds explode, that A) How is asking 25 million people to quarantine even possible, and B) Why there have not been riots reducing the city to a hellscape? For one, it's a lot easier when 99.9% of people are in lockstep that they want to get rid of this thing ASAP, myself included. Yeah there are anti-maskers, anti-quarantiners, or anti-vacc. You see them on social media, but literally, they are 1 in a million. You do see people here and there get a little stir crazy, but then they go have a smoke or something and calm down. But I think the real reason is that China has the best delivery system on the planet, hands down. I guess the US with Amazon Prime and Doordash are alright, but it seems like a 3rd world country compared to what they have here. I have to wait a day for stuff? I have to tip? I have to pay for delivery? These are questions I have never asked myself. Even before all of this, there is little reason to go to a grocery store when you can have things delivered to you for free, in an hour, for the same price you pay in the store. To top it off, a local veggie shop LITERALLY MOVED THEIR STORE to the 1st floor of an apartment building. So we had fresh fruit and vegetables for a couple of weeks until someone complained, and I guess the cops had to shut it down. Darn.

Andy Bear is my real BFF.

Anyway, we've been doing a lot of cooking. Last time we locked down, I discovered Shaoxing rice wine made everything taste good. Now I've discovered that oyster sauce also does that. And they totally work together. Other than cooking, I've been playing a lot of video games, as expected. I am making an effort to play every game in the Tales of... RPG series, which could honestly keep me occupied for 6 months. I've always been a homebody, and although I would like to go out to do something other than throw trash or get deliveries, I'm perfectly fine being at home this much. Plus we've both lost weight and saved a bunch of money, so, that's nice.

Oh, and work. We're back to teaching online, which I said last time how much I love. I will admit that my science classes are a bit more difficult, as it's tough to replicate without being in a classroom. But for language, oh yeah. It just works so much better. Plus I have a disdain for paper, so everything being digital is just awesome. I have written many batch files, macros, and Excel formulas to automate my job to a ridiculous degree, that I'm convinced this is truly the way to be teaching - on the couch with your classroom teddy bear.

This is the part where I tell you all of the amazing and cool times we've had around Shanghai, but yeah, not much of that! We had only been in school for 3 weeks before all of this kicked off. Still, there are two minor excursions: we went to the Shanghai Metro Museum, which despite my love of metros, was a bit lackluster. It's clearly meant for kids, and I was expecting something more technical. It's been on my list for a while though, so I was eager to check it off. The other place is a bit of local history - one of the big shopping, hangout areas in town is called Xujiahui, which means something like "The Xu Family Meeting Place". Turns out Mr. Xu has a tomb hidden in a small park a short walk from the metro station. Not exciting by any means, but it's a fun piece of local trivia if anyone asks you "Why is that named that?"

One of those bumps is Mr. Xu

Scrolling through my phone for photos, there's not much there, aside from my ever-more-disheveled appearance. You can see above I put in a photo of the bootleg veggie market, along with our government care package of stuff. We actually got another one a few days later, with some oranges and a chicken. And yes, I mean *a* chicken. Thankfully de-feathered, but uhhh, yeah. Everything else, still intact. At some point I'm going to figure out how to tackle that for dinner, which will be an interesting and probably bloody experience. Fortunately I've got lots of time, with free reign to do whatever I want except for classes and our regular mouth swabs. We've gotten 10 so far, which I think means we get a free sub on our next visit.