Inside a Chinese Prison!
From the guards in their COVID space suits to the loudspeakers and cameras on every corridor, everything suggests that this is not the place to be disobedient. OK, it might not really be a prison but this Chinese government quarantine hotel certainly seems like one.
The routine starts sometime between 06.30 and 07.00 with an early wake up call for the daily PCR test. Waiting outside the hotel room door is a fully gowned medical technical who takes two swabs in the mouth and nose. One goes so far up my nose I think it will come out of my ears! Then, there is just enough time to shower and get dressed before breakfast arrives.

Not the best meal. I usually manage the hard boiled egg, spring roll and a piece of cake. The rest is inedible. Fortunately the other two meals are significantly better.
I watched Steve Mcqueen (as Papillon) survive solitary confinement with strict regimes, pacing his cell and doing exercises. So that is exactly how I start each day. The room is around ten metres from door to window so five hundred 'lengths' should equate to the morning walk with the dog. I follow this with my poor attempts at the few yoga positions I know and cannot execute properly.
Although there is internet, and with wechat I can ccommunicate with friends here, I have no communication channel to home. Censureship is far worse that I remember from the last time I was here pre-Covid. There is no Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, Skype, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google (or Youtube), BBC, Netflix or any of the UK or US mainstream newspapers. Fortunately SkyfallRTW is still an approved website (although perhaps not after this post!). I did find the Manchester Evening News website. Maybe the censurers cannot understand the accent!
It is easy to tell when the next shipment of inmates is arriving. The loudspeakers in each corridor start barking instructions in unison, explaining (in chinese) what you can (very little) and cannot (quite a lot) do. The instructions last around three minutes but are repeated continually for the half hour it takes to get the inmates off the bus, scanned, tagged and led to their cells (sorry rooms). This palaver breaks the relative calm roughly twice a day.
