Taiwan Quarantine, Day 4

Did you miss any of the earlier posts in this series? Find them here:

Today seemed to go by fast (which was nice!). Three separate video calls with family used up pretty much all the morning. Some editing, some work on my Amazon ads, some exercise (Dance Dance Revolution for the win!), and some lesson planning for the after-school classes I'll be teaching this year used up the afternoon. As usual, working on my blog post is my after-dinner activity. And then I'm off to bed with one more day of quarantine under my belt!

This building, just visible to my far left as I peer out my window, intrigues me. During the day, it usually looks like a normal, solid, white building with a dark gray striped design in the middle. But after dark, it manages to look as though it's shaped kind of like an arch, with the enter part completely open (you know, like all those buildings in Hong Kong designed with the big holes so that dragons from the mountains can fly through them at night on their way to drink from the harbor ... never mind). A few irregular little lights in the gray part somehow look as though they're on buildings behind this one, adding to the night-time illusion that the center section is empty. (Or is it an illusion? I'm not completely convinced!) And on a foggy day, the white part fades into the mist, making it look as though a tall, narrow, dark gray structure stands there instead. I'm beginning to wonder if someone purposely designed this building to provide hours of perplexity for stir-crazy inmates peering out at the city from their solitary cells and trying to keep reality and their imagination separate. Then again, is it worth even trying to keep them separate? Some days I'm not so sure ...

Ok, time for the obligatory meal photos. Today I actually really enjoyed parts of both lunch and dinner! A couple of the items were actually my favorites out of everything we've been served so far.

Breakfast: the usual green leafy veggies and hard-boiled egg (but this time I actually had salt to put on it, thanks to yesterday's delivery from my friends!). The thin meaty thing pretending to be bacon wasn't bad, and I always like the almost-hashbrown patties with ketchup. I would like to also draw your attention to the large glutinous blob at the bottom right. I have no idea what it was this morning, but I'm pretty sure that in a past life it was part of the landscape on an alien planet, or perhaps a prop in a low-budget sci-fi movie that took place on said alien planet.
Lunch. Those breaded shrimp things were delicious! I wouldn't mind a couple of those every day! Spare me the lecture about how fattening they are, please. I'm pretty sure we've had at least one deep-fried item in every meal so far, so it's not like they're much worse than anything else. The greens were tastier than usual, too - good and garlicky, just the way I like them, not bitter like most greens here have been so far. The mushrooms in the center section were pretty good, too. The dark little strips at the top right I'm pretty sure were ni the fungus family too, but I didn't care for them much. One bite was plenty. I didn't eat the chicken wing with the green pepper pork, either, but the shrimp made up for the rest of it. Oh, and the white gourd tea? Just look at the squash in the picture, imagine it turned to liquid with sugar added, and that's exactly how it tasted.
Dinner: chicken curry with potatoes and carrots over rice. What a delightful change from the norm! This was definitely my favorite hotel dinner yet. I mixed the greens in with the curry and couldn't even taste their bitterness. I wasn't going to eat the deep-fried breaded pork slab, because deep-fried, but I took one bite and decided it was too good to let it go to waste. (I couldn't say the same about the slab of tofu.) Even the soup was pretty tasty. It had some kind of vegetable blossom (squash?) in it, which I know sounds weird, but it worked. The broth had a pleasant flavor. I had promised my Kindle we would have a dinner date this evening, so all in all, the meal was quite delightful.

Anyway, here are some pictures from tonight's sunset. The sun itself stayed hidden behind a cloud bank most of the way down, but the evening sky was still pretty. I'm so thankful for a room with nice big windows and a sunset view!

See later posts in the series here (once they're live):

Comments


One Reply to “Taiwan Quarantine, Day 4”

Cathy

I’d say Annie, you are going a little crazy in your isolation, with your rather imaginative comments about the glutinous blob’s origins – but no you’re actually just being exceedingly normal with your exceedingly imaginative comments there!

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