Day 7 of 10 of Quarantine in Shanghai

It has been a full week since I arrived in China.  I have a pretty steady routine going.  Every morning I wake up at 6:00 and exercise for thirty minutes.  I start with stretching and yoga and work my way into pushups, sit-ups, squats, windmills and other abdominal exercises.  I finish my workout with a cardio. Either I do jumping jacks for 5 min straight or I run back and forth from wall to wall in my balcony space for 5 minutes.  It is a pretty good workout all things considered.  My workout is typically accompanied by local radio.  My morning routine includes at least 15 min of mandarin lessons, which I do on the toilet.  Breakfast is typically outside my door by the time I get out of the shower at 7am.  I eat, brush my teeth, and then continue my mandarin lessons until about 7:30 when I sit down to start working.  

I teach daily from 8:00-8:50, 11:40-12:30, and 14:35-15:25.  Between classes I am grading, planning, meeting, and taking short breaks. 

Meals are delivered three times daily and are quite good.  Sometimes I have no idea what I am eating but nothing has been unpalatable.  Everything they have provided has been nourishing and tasty.  Some pictures of one day's meals are attached. 

My biggest challenge has been VPN connectivity.  I installed ExpressVPN before moving here.  I thought that paying for their service would mean a better and more reliable connection.  WOW was I wrong.  At least they have assured me that they are "aware of the problem" and that their engineers are "working tirelessly" to fix the problem.  They offered me a free month of service, and enough free weeks of service to add up to another month at this point.  Today is the first day all week that I had a reliable connection for the majority of the day and even still I have to frequently reconnect.    

Just put a Chinese sim card in my phone.  I no longer have an American phone number. 

Technically my quarantine period ends Monday night at 21:00 (9pm) but I leave here Tuesday morning as there are no flights Monday night.  




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