We last left our tired but intrepid neurotic on the threshold of the hotel room that would be his entire horizon for the next 14 days.
Before we continue, it is important to say that Laura and I watched countless videos of people in hotel quarantine in Korea. The experience varied by the hotel you are randomly sent to, but it was agreed that the Marina Bay was one of the best to find yourself at. Video after video showed its blessed inmates as having large rooms, well-appointed, with balconies, and generous welcome packages. The meals shown looked very appetizing, and the internees seemed to enjoy the quiet time to catch up on their yoga and skincare routines and Netflix watchlist. This looked eminently doable, and here I had won the lottery of hotels.
Now, it goes without say that this is not at all what I found. Life doesn't work that way, and probably less so for me. I usually have all the luck of a tree culled for toilet paper hoarded by fat people in Arkansas.
Lesson one: people often selectively present aspects of their lives on social media to appear more glamorous, killing it at life, hashtag-blessed. You don't see the crying fits, the dirty undies, the shameful online shopping compulsion and crushing credit card debt that goes with it. Despite being an old hat at the Internet, I forgot this cardinal rule, that people lie in the service of their carefully curated personas, and that what I was being shown was either presented flatteringly, or else wouldn't have made the vlog if the turd couldn't be sufficiently polished.
Lesson two: in the Plague Year, the situation changes by the week. Most of the videos we were looking at were months old. It had not occurred to me that the experience might deteriorate as the pandemic wore on. Our default mode of thinking is that things get better over time, when this year they have run in the opposite direction. Yes, we now have the vaccine, but more people are being infected than ever, and life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped by a whole year. All year, I said with the pace of events, I couldn't foresee next week, much less next month or next year. And yet here I blithely made all my plans and designs and fond imaginings with old information.
Now, having said the above, I may present to you what I encountered. A small room, in no better shape than one in an aging La Quinta or Holiday Inn, with a view that overlooks a boat yard and a small channel lined with industrial infrastructure. No sweeping views of the harbor, no people watching. The YouTube vloggers had been given a prince's ransom in snacks and ramen, slippers, an exercise band for God's sake. None of these awaited, just toilet paper, a stack of Dixie cups, a few thin towels, and a roll of orange biohazard trash sacks. Nothing in the way of cleaning supplies, despite maybe wanting to sanitize surfaces, or perhaps in case of spills. (I later discovered by examining the fire escape diagrams, that there are three different floor plans, and I got the smallest of these. The videos obviously featured the other floor plans.)
Of course, I was disappointed but desperately tired, ate a small sorry-you-missed-dinner dinner consisting of ramen, a juice box, and a chocolate bar (whatever; real food was coming tomorrow and it was going to be great), and did some cursory unpacking before hitting the hay.
The next morning, the loudspeaker crackled to life and announced, first in Korean, then English (why Korean? This quarantine system is for foreigners, not Koreans—they quarantine at home), that breakfast had arrived. (This is how the loudspeaker works; 30 seconds of static before and after the announcement.) I had no sooner unwrapped my breakfast and begun to examine its contents when there was a rap-tap-tapping on my chamber door. I donned a mask, and there was the facility doctor with a COVID swab. I told him I had been tested at the airport, that I had papers, that the instruction packet said the hotel test was for people who weren't tested at the airport. He was adamant, this is policy, we must follow policy, etc. I cut him off midsentence, pulled down my mask and told him to just do it already. He was gentler than Nurse Ratched at the airport, but it was still intensely uncomfortable. He screwed the cap on the test and told me to expect him again on the 13th day for more of the same.
Of course, daily they announce by the same crackly intercom that people who were not tested at the airport will be tested at their doors between the hours of 8 and 10. I double-checked the paperwork, and indeed, only residents of former Soviet republics and a few select other countries require the extra swab. Why always the extra scrutiny, I will never know.
Laura has an entirely different experience at the Ramada, where she's quarantining about 40 km away, and I will let her describe her own experience, as well as what passes for food where she's at.
I can only describe my own meals. They come three times a day, at 8, noon, and 6. The meals always arrive cold, without the ability to heat them, and the overall quality varies wildly from school cafeteria to prison chow. Breakfasts are vaguely Western, with cured meat and eggs, or quail's eggs, and then some oddball elements like cocktail wieners, rice balls, fruit cups that also include tomatoes, and some kimchi pickle, usually of daikon radish. These are generally the most edible meals of the day.
Meals later in the day can be more or less palatable to Western tastes. Usually there is rice and some protein, be it bulgogi or katsu-fried fish, kimchi, and then an assortment of other items. Among these invariably are cocktail weenies, which is incredible given that three separate companies at least produce our meals. There are various vegetables, usually covered in a garlicky red pepper paste and usually tasty. Then there odd mayonnaise-based salads, containing some combination of egg, potato, macaroni, and apple slices—sometimes all at once. There are seaweed salads or pickles, which is not my thing, but not unusual. But then there are some truly odd, insanely pungent relishes—I don't know a better word, mix, medley?—based on dried shredded squid, dried tadpoles, dried tiny eggs, usually with mung beans. These I have to carefully remove from the tray before I can begin to eat, and often their odor has already flavored everything else in the box.
Each meal comes with a soup, usually some sort of miso-based broth, or corn purée, which is often accompanies breakfast. Breakfast usually also comes with plain yogurt, and most meals have a piece of fruit or pieces of fruit (and tomatoes). Beverages are either a 16 oz. water bottle or a juice box, and only at some meals, with no rhyme or reason I can see for their inclusion or exclusion. Every other day they may tuck a packaged snack of some sort, a cookie or candy. Some dinners also include dried ramen, in case you get hungry between meals or if you don't care for anything you've been given.
These meals don't resemble the YouTube videos. It's not that there's not enough of it, or that it's very bad, but it's just not good. I honestly like Korean food, but I don't think this is what Koreans eat. It's quite a let down. All your adult life, you choose what you eat, you get the things necessary for it and make it, or pay someone to make it for you, but always something you choose. Here there is no choice, and the quality and variety are so variable. (As I often quote my old psych profs, the two greatest predictors of happiness are predictability and control.) I realize the irony of saying this as a citizen of a nation that locks innocent kids in cages (which I oppose with every fiber of my being), but it just seems to me that, when the food and the room are considered, the amount of hospitality owed to people you lock in their rooms for 14 days, utterly dependent on you, is a little higher than this.
Why then the deterioration in the quality of the quarantine experience? Again, some of it is false presentation by vloggers curating their branded lifestyles, and a pox unto them. But it really does seem that quality has diminished, and I don't know if that's due to the cupidity of the contractors, or funding cuts, or an attempt to subtly discourage all but the most essential visitors, or some combination of all three.
This entry grows too long, and rambles, so I close here. I will say more about how I structure my days in quarantine in another post.
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