Unless you've been living under a rock, you may have heard that we're having a pandemic this year, the coronavirus now known as Covid-19. This has been an interesting experience for me. In past years, I've somehow missed the exciting new flavors of panic, having been in the wrong place each time - and that was just fine with me. However, when I first read about the new plague in China before I came back from winter vacation, I did find myself thinking, "Oh. China. That's, like, next door, eh?"
Funnily enough, my flight back on January 17 went through Beijing. At the time, that didn't seem as risky as it does now. I didn't wear a mask, and simply went about life as usual - eating at Pizza Hut (the only good restaurant in the international terminal) and trying to kill time while waiting for my flight. I was irritated when I got back to Mongolia because they made us wait on the plane for health inspectors to come collect the health declaration, but although I've never been in the epicenter of an outbreak before, I've traveled in the time of everything from mad cow to swine flu, so I really didn't think much about it.
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| Now dinner comes with a moist towelette AND hand sanitizer... |
It was about a week later that I realized this was going to be a biohazard of a completely different color. After dinner with Engrish and Blondie, I got into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the school. Immediately he started trying to tell me something, but I wasn't exactly sure what. The next morning one of my colleagues enlightened me: the government had ordered schools to close UNTIL MARCH 3. In school terms, that's approximately forever. I didn't believe it - I had to message Engrish and ask her about it in order to consider that this was happening. And that was three weeks ago. Now fortunately for us and our students, we live in the digital era, and this means that learning can still take place. Sort of. It's kind of hard to teach art online - I've had to do a lot with art journaling and reviewing fundamentals, but I'm hoping that when they get started for real that their work will benefit from what we're discussing. But apart from that, the quarantine order has basically made it impossible for me to establish any sort of routine in my life. We teachers go into work three hours a day, and while the first week I thought, "Hey, I could get used to this!" I quickly got bored. I should probably be using that time to do all sorts of wild and crazy things, but...well...I'm just not feeling it. I think I need the stress from the 5.5 hours of work I don't have to do each day to feel motivated to do things like work on my art, or do my homework.
There is one wild and crazy thing that I've done, though, enabled by the short work days. A certain event takes place twice a year in Chiba, which for some inexplicable reason I missed every time during the two years I lived in Japan. Now on a normal weekend there's no way you could make it to Japan and back, but I managed to convince the school to let me off my leash in exchange for working a couple of long days, and off I went. Three weeks had made a helluva lot of difference in travel. Pretty much everyone wore a mask on the plane, and even in the airport. I also noticed a LOT of hand sanitizer dispensers. They might have been there before and I only noticed them because the fact that Incheon was still running flights to China sketched me out a little, but still. The flight back to Mongolia was only about 1/3 full, and in addition to having our health declarations collected before we left the flight, the inspectors came on the plane in full hazmat suits and scanned our foreheads to check for fever.
It was kind of crazy. In two weeks we are supposed to be back at school on a normal schedule. Since Mongolia has yet to report a single confirmed case of Covid-19, it seems reasonable to think this isn't just a pipe dream, that we'll actually be teaching again. However, in the last week the government officially cancelled Tsagaan Sar, one of Mongolia's two big holidays - no wrestling matches, no big formal celebrations - so who knows how it will actually play out. Although it annoys the heck out of me, I kind of get where the government is coming from - Mongolia doesn't exactly have the medical facilities to deal with the Big Nasty. Still, I'll definitely have a celebratory coke when things get back to normal.
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