Upon my arrival in Korea, it was mandatory for me to complete a two-week quarantine before being able to roam free. My designated quarantine location was a dormitory on the campus of Konkuk University in Chungju, a two-hour bus ride from Incheon Airport. As I noted in my previous post, I arrived safely to my assigned dorm room that night and ate, showered, and crashed. Now, two weeks later, I am almost free! As of this typing, only 14 hours to go! Before I taste my release, I wanted to fill you all in on how my two weeks of quarantine have gone.

My room was decked out with stuff that I did not get to fully check out the first night; I was too tired. So in the morning, I took stock of everything the staff here supplied us. I had an electric kettle, mug, coffee, tea, 15 two-liter bottles of water, ramen, chopsticks, a bowl, towels, garbage bags, a thermometer, disinfectant spray, hand sanitizer, tissues, masks, gloves, an outlet adaptor, room slippers, bathroom slippers, and sheets and a pillow for the bed. All of which I am allowed to keep! But that’s just the main room. In the bathroom, there was body wash, shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, laundry bar soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, and toilet paper, which again, I was allowed to keep. They even supplied two large shopping bags to use for all the stuff when I leave. It was nice to arrive to a room that wasn’t empty and already contained some essential items. It also meant less unpacking I had to do!

I, as well as the rest of the new teachers here (there’s 130 of us at this location), am not allowed to leave my room at all. So how do we get food for our meals? Well, the quarantine staff here deliver our meals to us three times a day, at 8:30 am, 12:30 pm, and 5:30 pm. They leave the food outside our doors (wrapped up of course) and then make an announcement over the PA system so we know that all the food has been delivered and we can open our doors to grab it. Once we’re finished, we use the garbage bags to throw out our leftover food and trash; we just have to spray the bag with the disinfectant before putting it out. They did garbage pickup three times a day as well (10 am, 2 pm, and 9 pm). They have been taking COVID-19 very seriously over here. Even though they aren’t coming in direct contact with us, the staff still wear full PPE when delivering the food and picking up the trash. As part of quarantine, we also had to download an app so we could record our temperature twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. We have to do that every day of quarantine. Lastly, we also have to take two COVID tests. We took the first one they day after our arrival and the second one today, the day before we’re free (as long as we test negative!).

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Quick appreciation shoutout for the staff here! They have been absolutely fantastic. Any issues people had with their rooms, they were quick to respond and/or send an engineer to look at the issue. If you ran out of water and requested more, they delivered another 6-pack of 2-liters to you free of charge. They even delivered surprise snacks and gifts to us to keep your spirits high. Chips and a coke one day, a bulgogi burger from Burger King another, chocolate twice on Valentine’s Day, and more chips, chocolate and coke another day. And then today, to celebrate our last night, they got us a tumbler, more water, more coke, and a PEPPERONI PIZZA! I was really excited about the pizza; I’d been craving some badly.

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So, what did I do to occupy myself for two weeks?? Well, I was looking forward to having absolutely nothing to do for once. It has been way too long since I had no work to do, emails to check, schoolwork to complete, etc. BUT then I remembered I did have some pre-orientation videos and Korean lesson videos to watch. There weren’t many of them and we did not need to take notes and would not be quizzed on them, so I was able to breeze through them pretty quickly. We are in a new age after all; we’re all pros at binging thanks to digital TV. That said, though, I didn’t actually do any other binging, surprisingly. I did keep up with my superhero shows (WandaVision, Batwoman, and Black Lightning), but I didn’t binge anything else to pass the time. I was also unfortunately unable to hook up my PS4, so I didn’t get any gaming in either. Instead, I zoomed with some of my friends, both back home and here in quarantine with me, surfed the internet A LOT, and app-hopped on my phone. However, in between all of that, I did get some reading done. I finished two books, Oathbringer and Dawnshard, and started a third, Rhythm of War. All of them are from The Stormlight Archive fantasy series. Between the two books alone that I finished, I read almost 1,500 pages, and RoW is another 1,200 pages, so reading really took a good chunk of my time actually. And I did get some exercising in. My most productive exercise was pacing my room while reading on my Kindle. I got 3.5 miles in one day doing that. And possibly dug a small trench in my room in the process. Lastly, I window watched a lot. It wasn’t a good view for people watching, but it was decent enough otherwise.

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And so, I have survived quarantine. Tonight is my last night and I will be a free man tomorrow at noon. With a bit of a caveat, that is. My orientation will be here on Konkuk’s campus as well so while I’ll thankfully be able to stay in my same room and not have to move, all of us teachers most likely won’t be able to leave campus and explore. The EPIK staff won’t want us to take the risk and get sick before we finish orientation and make it to our respective cities. Since we’ll all be together for the week, it’d only take one of us getting infected for it to spread through all of us. So, for now, I am glad to have finished quarantine unscathed and will gladly take the prize of being able to go outside for some fresh air. Exploring the city (and the rest of Korea) can wait. It’ll be worth it.

The lyrics for this post’s title came from Childish Gambino’s Wonderful (featuring Josh Osho)