Shanghai Airport to quarantine hotel
To continue our moving saga: We made it to the Shanghai airport. They have turned what once was one of the world’s busiest airports into a crazy empty maze with completely hazmat suited workers including goggles and taped on gloves. As we pass they quickly wiped everything down including their gloves.
We spent the next 6 hours navigating the airport: down one corridor to show our green code, another to fill out more paperwork, another to get our mouth or nose swabbed, another corridor to fill out more paperwork, then through the slowest passport control ever – there was no line but they checked that each letter was correct. Then we went through another maze to get our luggage, then we navigated through to a holding area for passengers that eventually will be going to Beijing. When we finally released from that area we were led though the maze to a quarantine hotel shuttle. A colleague of Dan’s, on the phone was concerned they were sending us the wrong way. We got one of the hazmats to talk on the phone and indeed, we were put in with the regular population while the colleague had arranged for us to go to VIP accommodations. An hour later we had been rerouted, re-held, redirected, until we were in a different area getting onto a different quarantine hotel shuttle.
We sat on the bus for an hour to our hotel. As we entered the hotel grounds, the weeds were hip high and growing through the driveway, the front door was boarded up and the windows were so filthy you couldn’t see through it. Inside the lobby was also make-shift and filthy. It was shockingly not what we’d think of as VIP. As we were being signed in, it became clear they were going to separate Celia as she is considered an adult in China. Luckily we had been warned this might happen and had her doctor write and official letter, which as had translated into Mandarin, that she could not be separated. The Hazmatters were unhappy about the note and unsure what to do, but they eventually agreed to let Celia and I be in a room together. Dan and Morton were sent to the room next to us and the Michael/Boyle Family got the two following rooms. We went up to the 17th floor – where our rooms were and were quite surprised, considering the lobby, how nice the rooms were.
They put a table in front of each room with a paper indicating how many people were inside and we went in. Lunch quickly arrived onto the tables: flat plastic containers with five compartments of heavily oiled and salted sautéed food, another container or rice, and tiny drinkable yogurt and an orange.
We unpacked some of our stuff, settled in, and fell asleep. It had been a crazy long trip.