The Quarantine

As mentioned in earlier posting,  3 + 4  quarantine policy means 3 Days “confinement” followed by 4 Days of self – monitored isolation.  However, the day of arrival does not count as the 1 day, so in reality, the 3 days start on the day after your arrival and you actually are under confinement for 4 days. During these 4 days, we are not allowed to step outside.  Unless you have a place that you and your spouse can stay in isolation, most people will have to stay in designated quarantined hotel.  These hotels normally will provide 3 meal a day as part of the per day rates for a room. The only roommates you can have is your spouse. Your friends and family are not allowed to bring food to you.

Day 1

Thanks to our family friends Jensen for letting moved into his 3 bedroom condo unit, we have more flexibility. After Jensen gave us a quick intro to his condo, he left for work and we are now on our own for the next 4 days. Claudia pick the room we are will be using. Even though Jensen had prep his master bedroom for us, we didn’t feel right to use it and settle into one of his daughter’s room since she is going to college in U.S.  While Claudia start to unpack your stuff and setup her laptop,  I started trying to find how to get lunch.  Our shuttle driver had recommended a fried chicken place close by and I tried to google for it.  Oh did I mentioned that, though I can converse in mandarin, I can barely read. So it is a challenge for me to browse the menu in chinese.

Thanks to Mr. Goo ger, as a local would refer to Google as his Brother Goo, it was so easy to look up restaurant it the vicinity.  There are two delivery service providers, Uber Eats and Food Panda which have pictorial menu format for online browsing.  This is helpful as we are not familiar with the food offering. especially for an illiterate like me.  I opted to use Food Panda mainly because, it was able to locate my address while Uber Eats require me to input my delivery address.  Since I my phone isn’t setup for chinese keyboard it would be hard for me to input the address in chinese. If you have never been to Taiwan,  the address format is no where like the United States. In the US, you common format is —  123 Main Street,  MyCity, MyState, zip.  In Taiwan this is the format –10491 Taipei City. Alley 7, Lane 397, Mingshu Rd 36.  The 36 is the Unit #.  This is the address the Food Panda found for my address. The unit # was off, but that is understandable.

For our First lunch we went with the Fried Chicken place.  Being unfamiliar with how online ordering works, Claudia decided to call in the order and fortunately, there is a NT$500 minimum for delivery. Not a problem.  Too bad, we ate them before I even thought of taking a pic. Just take my word, only their pop corn chicken is worth mentioning, the rest of their fried items are just okay. Unlike States side, where Ketchup, Tabasco sauce are provided, those are not available. Only thing provided were pepper and chilli powder sachet.  I like my fried chicken with sweet chili sauce especially  Philip Pineapple Sweet Chili sauce  This sauce has pineapple flavor in it and is my go to sauce for anything that call for sweet and sour or sweet chili sauce.

Since we have enough left over, we didn’t order any dinner. In addition, Claudia had packed of carry-on full of instant noodles and her favorites snacks.
I am sure you all have this experience where you pack a week worth of food on a trip and ended up not consuming any during the trip.

The Check-in:  As expected, we had our first daily check-in by the Taiwanese CEDC agency. Both Claudia and I received a call on our designated phone to check on our health. Since I came in on a US Passport, my caller spoke to me in English while Claudia who uses her Taiwanese passport for entry received a mandarin speaking caller. Pretty neat!   The next 2 days, we received just text messages like this

Day 2 & 3:

Sad to say our routine for the next 2 days are just boring, Claudia continued with her day trading activities while I kill time figure what’s for breakfast, lunch, or dinner (what a life huh?). Of course, writing this Travel Taiwan 2022 really helped past my life. When I told Claudia that I am going to write about this trip, she cracked up laughing – “you writing a blog?”. Only after she saw the articles that she realized I am serious and started telling her friends.

After spending a day figuring out WordPress and editing the Template, I was able to start posting.  To me writing comes easy if you are not under any pressure and when there is already a topic, in this case Taiwan. In addition, I just put whatever comes to mind as you will noticed by the “wordiness” of each paragraph. I am not writing a thesis, just writing my thoughts!

For the 3 days, Claudia sister was so sweet to deliver breakfast for us. It was an hour drive from her Linkuo residence to where we are at in Taipei and another 40- 60 minutes to her office. She was insistence on bring us food despite our objections. She even brought us fresh vegetables after hearing Claudia passing comment about wanting some veggies.  As my goal for this trip is to experience the various local “cuisines”, I continued searching for what our next meal would be.

Below are a sampling of our meal.  Not sure about Uber Eats, with Food Panda, we can pay with cash upon delivery since we do not want to use our credit card.

The four days under quarantine eventually came to past, overall it was not such a bad experience compared to the experiences of other people we talked to who had to go through 14 days quarantined in a designated hotels room where you are not allowed to step out of the room and the only food allowed are those provided by the hotels. These are not your 5 Stars Hotels and you have to pay for your stay. The rates range from USD $60 to USD$400 a night ( I could be wrong on the high end). So in this aspect, we were lucky to that Jensen gave up his condo for us and the quarantine monitoring were more lax compared to in the early days where I have seen in the news where violators who snuck out to go clubbing, parties, were arrested on the spot because their phones were tracked or they were not in their room when the CEDC monitor came by to check on them.