Day 10, that sounds like... getting there! 3 more full days, and then our check-out day. If we count it in hours, we have to do slightly over 300 hours in quarantine (it's actually just a bit less than 13 full days, because arrival and departure day both count as a full day). Now we have less than 90 hours to go, more than 70% done. Ha! Things are going fine, we're all good. Of course, I'll be extremely happy to feel the earth beneath my feet and some sun on my skin, but not desperate yet. Today I want to take you along on a day's schedule in details: what are we doing (you know the things we do from a previous post) and how does that translate into filling a day?
7.20am, we wake up. As there is no hurry to get up, we snooze again, and by the time we're ready to rise and shine, it's 8.15am. Usually I wake up when they knock the door, to announce the arrival of the breakfast, and this has always been around 7am - 7.30am latest. Today it was later, so we slept longer! In fact, before we got up, we already completed our daily health surveys as instructed; one in an online questionnaire, another one on the MySejahtera tracing app. Once we got up, we took showers and I even shaved today - I felt like doing that, just like that.
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| If you look carefully, you'll see that the electricity wire is full with birds. They are coming every morning, someone across the street is feeding them every morning. They'll be waiting there for a while, and once the food is there, they'll fly across the street and enjoy their feast. |
8.30am, breakfast arrives! Much later than we're used to, but no problem of course. Roti canai again (third time), yummy. If you get your food delivered ready, in a plastic box, it takes all but 15 minutes to finish it and clean the table... But no worries, after breakfast comes: coffee of course! So we make our fresh coffee, and enjoy it seated in our cozy Helinox chairs at the window, enjoying the morning view.
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| The past days it was a bit hazy, but today was a very clear day - especially in the morning. On top of the hill (mountain, in fact) in the distance you can even see Genting. |
9.15am, coffee is finished and we disappear into our iPhones for a while. Reading newspapers, reading and answering WhatsApp messages that have arrived during the night, quick updates on social media (that takes very little time though), quick scan through emails. All that takes a short time only, after which we both play some "stupid" games on the phone.
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| Stupid games, but what to do. They're just a way to keep us busy... After quarantine they'll definitely disappear from my phone. |
10am. I start to work on my 1993 book, Ellen reads a book. Today I finished the entire Nepal part of the trip, and prepared the last chapter, India. Once I get into the book, I'm very concentrated and so before I knew, I spent about 2,5 hours editing text, creating layout, pasting pictures - to the extent that my right arm hurts from typing and accurately positioning the text and picture boxes with the touchpad. By 12.30pm it's really time to take a break, and basically lunch could arrive any time as well. While waiting for lunch to arrive, I answer some emails (not that it's that many, that's a thing of the past!), go through Facebook comments from yesterday's post and check on a link to cars for sale, which Sen sent. Yes, we might be buying a cheap second hand car for the time we'll be in KL this time...
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| Page 244, the start of the India chapter. That's another 1.5 month of diary, with lots and lots of pictures. I think I'll try to finish it tomorrow! In total, the book will become well over 300 pages! |
1.10pm. Lunch arrives! Rice and fish, yay... One of the lesser meals. And to top it, we had apple number 8 as dessert. Ah, really, no other fruit than apples since the beginning of this quarantine. As the lunch was not the best, the apple very small, we ate little more from our own provisions, some toasted bread (beschuit) with Nutella, hahaha, yummy.
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| Ding dong, lunch has arrived. Rice and fish, and as you see, another apple... |
1.40pm. So what now? It's one of those moments that we're a bit lost for what to do. It then becomes a bit of everything and nothing. Doing the dishes (that is: some cutlery and the coffee stuff), look for a next book to read (Oorlog en Terpentijn!), hang around, fill time.
2pm. As I don't want to go back beyond my laptop (yet), I start playing stupid games again. It's not my favourite pastime, but then again, it's really good to kill time. On top of that, I have "rediscovered" to listen to music with my earphones instead of the small speaker, and I've really enjoyed it - even gave me goose bumps listening to a good Portishead album.
2.45pm. Enough of those games, really, time for coffee number 2!
3.15pm. I get behind my laptop again, still with music in my ears - Massive Attack now. Ah, this is so good!!! I still had a few mails to answer, and then mostly spent time working on the blog; not preparing a blog post, but more about the general layout (made some small changes to it, but you need to do that step by step and check the effect before continuing; Blogger is not that super user friendly), doing some updates, checking the statistics, ... I've also been checking how ads work; not that I want to make money with the blog, as such, but I'm interested to understand how it all works and experiment with it. So, soon, you might see ads - don't be alarmed by it, it's an experiment.
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| Messing around in Blogger... By the way, a little stat: this is post number 222 on my blog! |
5.15pm. Highest time for our daily fitness exercises! We've done this every day of the quarantine so far, with varying intensity, and it feels very good. Today we did a session for leg and core strengthening, followed by the daily abs strengthening exercises. We are also building up planking time, and are now at 2'20" - but we skipped that today, for the first time, because it had been a lot of core exercises before; it would have been too much.
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| Not easy to take a good picture with the timer and without tripod, while doing these exercises, I had to try several times... Captured while doing sumo squads - no no, we're not posing at all! |
6.10pm. The exercises are (obviously) in the room, in the air conditioning, yet sometimes they're quite intense, and today we were very sweaty afterwards. We took a quick shower, and then got ready for dinner - which arrives between 6pm and 8pm. It has quite literally arrived between these times, very varying. We were just killing time, waiting for it to arrive, but soon it came!
6.45pm. Dinner! And what a dinner! Woohoo. Crusty deep fried chicken with mashed potatoes (what a treat) and cole slaw (nice nice!). Honestly, normally it would be a nice dinner but nothing special, but now it was a very welcome variation from all we've had so far. Hahaha, how you get to appreciate the little things in life, once again. Doing dishes again (in the bathroom sink of course), then we had an evening tea, cozy together. We even started to make a list of things to do after the quarantine; yes, we can start looking ahead at our soon-to-come freedom.
7.30pm. Blogging time. Import photo's from camera and prepare them, write the text, insert the pictures with captions, check a preview to make sure it all looks fine. Publish!
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| This is what you're currently looking at. |
9.15pm. Now I'm looking into the future. I'll start reading the new book I downloaded, or maybe watch a movie - that would be the first one we watch since we got here. Around 11pm we'll go to sleep, and who knows, maybe first we'll try the Sideways Samba on page 113...