Get them while they're hot - buns buns buns

I have just come out of 14 days' quarantine after having managed to get onto one of the last flights from France into China!

To protect the covid-free health status of the capital city, international flights bound for Beijing all land in Tianjin, around 110 km farther away to the East. And all travellers have to go through 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room assigned by the local government. We do not get to choose the hotel, nor the room, nor the view, nor the food. And of course, we are not allowed out of our bedroom and there is no room service.

I think I can consider myself lucky to have had pretty good quarantine conditions at the Society Hill Hotel. My hotel room was suitably spacious at around 25m²; it was comfortable; I had a view on the sister conference hotel across the avenue, a large wooded park and the high speed railway with trains zooming past every 15 minutes.

The room was equiped with essentials to last the 14 days alone: soap, shampoo, conditioner, toilet paper, tea bags, kettle, 8 litres of drinking water, a bar of soap to wash clothes, broom and dustpan, even a mop and bucket. I was lucky to be alone in a twin-bed room. I was therefore able to switch beds and towels half way through the quarantine.

The Internet connection was rather patchy but good enough to be able to telework on my new job. I am now one of the three counselors for agricultural affairs at the French embassy in Beijing, to cover China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mongolia. It is likely that I will not be able to blog about my work because of its classified nature. However, I will keep posting blogs on my travels, musical and culinary adventures.

So back to my quarantine: the few people I crossed during 14 days starting from the airplane door until I got out of quarantine were all clad in full protective equipment, masks, goggles and extra transparent face screen. Outside in the streets, people were strolling together unmasked, at least during the first week. The feeling was quite surreal.

 Thanks to my teleworking during the day, I did not get bored. I had a Kindle stocked full of books for the evening and the weekends and could also download and listen to radio podcasts. The past 14 days have been like a restful moment to get over jet lag, observe the people on the streets outside, listen carefully and intently to the radio broadcast.  

My food was served at set hours: 7.30am breakfast, 11.30am lunch and 5.30pm dinner. Somebody would deposit my food box on the console outside my bedroom and knock on the door. When I opened the door, the long corridor was already empty...

The food was of good quality and varied. Always Chinese food; there were no other options. Other quarantined guests were complaining bitterly on the chat group we were all on, or requesting exotic items like lemon or even croissants. I was quite content with the food served. We had our five fruits or - especially - vegetables per day, some meat or fish, rice or dumplings, soup or porridge. After insisting over two days, I was given a large box of chili preserve to spice up the food.

The only meal that was rather boring was breakfast. It invariably consisted of millet or rice porridge, some kind of raw vegetable salad, preserved turnip or carrot, slices of ham, a hard-boiled egg, and buns. The only variety came with: 

1) the vegetables, which changed every day;

2) the preserved turnip, which was either just salted or spiced;

3) the buns.

I was actually quite surprised by the variety of colour and form of the buns that appeared each morning in my breakfast box: steamed buns coming in all sorts of colourful patterns and shapes, oven-baked buns, plain or filled with red bean, coconut or other sweet paste.  

On the morning of day 13, when I opened the breakfast tray to find a pack of warm sterilised milk, 4 slices of very plain white bread, a cold fried egg, two slices of ham, a bunch of sliced iceberg lettuce and a tablespoon of mayonnaise, I even came to regret the Chinese breafast.

My quarantine ended on a high note of beautiful sunny weather and the expected thrill of visiting the old city centre of Tianjin where I had booked a colonial style bedroom at the upmarket Astor Hotel, to celebrate my renewed freedom with style.

The taxi ride from the quarantine hotel to the city centre was slow through the evening traffic jam. I was definitely very relaxed upon arriving at the Astor. And that is when the reality of modern China suddenly struck me a very hard blow.

To be continued... here.

Hot cross buns, hot cross buns

Traditional nursery rhyme, The tick tock boys, The children's favourites collection - the teddy bear's picnic and many others