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.