Perspectives from Day 12

Today marks Day 12 of our hotel quarantine. I'm not going to lie, it has got harder as we've racked up the days, so here's how it's actually looked for us.

Our laptops have been absolute workhorses - streaming Netflix and Disney+, watching a myriad of Youtube videos, shopping for kitchen appliances, phones, cars, and researching our upcoming kitchen reno.

We've paced the length of the room a number of times each day, going for a 'walk to the coffee shop' and back again - Cameron more often that me by a long margin.

We've done a lot of liaising with our rental agent about the state our house - our parents have been by frequently to resuscitate the garden and suss out the inside, so we've been going back and forth sorting that out. 

Meals have been one of the hardest things to get used to - while the food isn't awful (the flavours are generally quite good), it's also no longer...exciting. We get a newsletter most nights, with the menu for the next day, a couple of puzzles, and a note from the hotel's GM. I've taken to not looking at the menu to try and maintain some enthusiasm for our food-knocks (they deliver the food in the hall, knock on the door, and you have to wait til they're no longer visible before you can collect it). There's a heavy focus on carbs - white rice, couscous, polenta, white bread rolls - and that's been a hard adjustment since we're used to eating mainly wholemeal and seeded carbs. Salads and veggies are few and far between and often if something's roasted, by the time it arrives on our doorstep, the crispiness has transformed to sogginess thanks to the sealed alfoil containers. Don't even get me started on the scrambled eggs or breakfast fritattas....

We caved this week and requested a banh mi delivery from a friend and my god, was it the most delicious thing ever. For those of you in Adelaide, Miss Mai makes the BEST roast pork banh mi AND they give the option of wholemeal rolls. It was the first time in a week that we'd eaten the entirety of a meal and I didn't eat ANY of my dinner because I was so full. What a wonderful change :D 

There were a couple of days right in the middle where we fell into a slump, feeling quite flat and depressed. We realised part of it was because when we had come into quarantine, we smashed through a bunch of our life admin tasks, so we had nothing left (or thought we had nothing left) to really use our days to achieve anything with. Silly us. There was still plenty for us to do, but that's one piece of advice we'd give to anyone in the same situation - spread that shit out! Ration your jobs to one to two per day - your overall mental health will be the better for it. 

Cameron's been pretty diligent doing some form of exervise each day, whether it's yoga or a HIT class. Me .... less so. 

The daily calls from nurses and SAPOL have been pretty good. You never know when they're going to come, and the nurses are always super lovely. We've generally had a different person each day, and same with the SAPOL. It's interesting to see who has a sense of humour, who's perfunctory, who's hella Aussie. 

We also haven't watched anywhere near as much tv as we expected and a large part of that is down to not being able to hook our external hard drive into the TV or access streaming services through it. Both a shame and not.

We definitely think the next two days are going to be harder, as we wait for the final Covid test to come back negative, and watch the clock tick down on our remaining time here. 

One thing that's made this experience better than I expected was the hotel. The Stamford Plaza here on North Terrace has been incredible - their staff are professional and caring, they provide the aforementioned newsletters daily (or across a couple of days depending on public holidays/weekends), and they have created a Facebook group where they post games and foster interaction amongst us quarintinees. In the 12 days we've been in, staff have played 2 x Pictionary games, 1 x guess how many snakes are in the jar, and 1 x set of bingo. We have won 3 of those games >.> That's contributed to our overall enjoyment, no question, but for the hotel to put in the time and resources for these games, that's not to be underestimated or underappreciated. 

Quarantine has had it's moments but overall, it's such a necessary thing. We're so grateful to soon be out and able to walk freely in the streets, to hug our family and friends, and that's because of mandatory things like this. Having come from a country where Covid is running rife, it's definitely given us a better appreciation and perspective for what Australia is doing and how it's handling the pandemic.