Quarantine Diary Day 4: A Whole Fish in a To-Go Box Compartment
Today started quite early. They day before, the person who took my afternoon temperature said they’d come around 6:30am today to do our Day 4 PCR test. They ended up coming around 6:50am, and did nose and throat swabs.
So it wasn’t surprising then, that our breakfast was delayed again, in order to complete the PCR tests. We got breakfast around 8:15am
In the plastic container, there was a hard-boiled egg, sweet potato, and the pink thing is this highly processed “bacon.” Later in my WeChat group of people from my flight in this hotel, they called this “人造培根“ or man-made bacon.
There was this pretty steamed scallion roll.
And a meat bun. It’s hard to describe why this meat bun seemed very cheap, but maybe it’s because the the meat itself is a kind of small, dryish disc inside, with a lot of bread around it.
I liked the purple rice congee 紫米粥.
I decided to make a sandwich out of the scallion roll, egg, and “bacon.” See the air holes in the “bacon”? Kind of like a sponge. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have eaten it. And despite (or because of?) being so processed, there was hardly any flavor to it. So I added the zhacai 榨菜 (preserved mustard tubers) that were probably supposed to have gone into the congee, onto the sandwich.
Lunch came a few minutes early, around 11:54pm.
Prawns again! But these were bigger this time.
Napa cabbage and vermicelli noodles 粉丝.
It’s not apparent, but this was a chicken drumette. I think it’s with the “Irish” seasoning they use in China. I learned about that seasoning when I was at the Jianguo Hotel, and they provided a printed menu.
This was I think mushrooms and … chicken? Again, this is where a printed menu would come in handy, like at Jianguo Hotel. But in general, these dishes are nowhere near as inventive as Jianguo’s dishes.
After lunch, with the banana that was given to us, I prepared a little coffee with half of a capsule of instant coffee that my office gave me. I used a gold-lipped porcelain cup that is part of a travel tea set that my sister gave me! And had a Trader Joe’s Mint Cream alongside the coffee too. It was nice to have this tea set - brought some simple pleasures to quarantine life!
Dinner was interesting! There was the yogurt again.
Inside the big compartment where there was the pork cutlet yesterday, they fit a whole, compact pomfret in today! This felt kind of special.
This was daikon and pieces of those chewy meatballs.
Some vegetables.
And then there were pieces of spicy fried chicken … cartilage. Like those crunchy parts at the end of a drumstick. The taste was good, but I wouldn’t order cartilage in a restaurant. (IKEA actually serves a skewer of chicken cartilage in their to-go eatery after checkout.)
