…And Back Again

Quarantine Highlights

Other people! — including getting to watch how our newly-met-in-person friends handle quarantine, some of them with young children! Fun ideas like coloring time on the shower walls, sock-waterbottle-bowling, and walk-a-marathon-by-the-end-of-quarantine.

Internet — we are able to work, teach, and call family in our hotel. We weren’t sure beforehand what this would look like, but we’re very grateful that we can still be working and staying ahead of things. (Though we had partially hoped there would be no internet so we could relax into jet lag and quarantine, but alas, no such “luck”).

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Our actual travels were about as good as could be expected. We experienced numerous small blessings throughout the trip, including an extra family traveling with us (their itinerary changed last-minute — stressful change but we were glad to have them with us) and a literally-last-minute embassy acceptance of one traveler’s COVID test paperwork. Every flight attendant and airline employee was helpful and understanding of the (sometimes loud and/or energetic) 2- and 4-year-olds. Though the airline didn’t provide regular meals, they did give us lots of snacks – more than we had anticipated. Two gals from our group were able to quarantine together without a hassle, helping preserve their sanity.

There were a couple exceptionally long lines — we were some of the last ones off of our double-decker, massive air plane (an Airbus A380, wethinks?). So hundreds of people ahead of us in line. We essentially waited through this line twice — once to go through the modified version of customs, and again as people boarded the buses that would take them to hotels for quarantine. Still, it was a much better experience getting to chat with colleagues and watch kids run around than it would have been by ourselves!

Really, the rest can probably be said through pictures! While we’re not great at remembering to take pics while traveling, we did our best and at least took more than we normally would: