That was the period I had to sit inside. Without fresh air, but with an air conditioner, but without a remote control….. As you have already read in my blog ‘Preparations Thailand Part 2/2’, I had to have an ‘Alternative State Quarentine reservation’. No worries if you don’t know the term, for you it is useless information. But if you are reading this text right now, let me explain it briefly!
Alternative State Quarantine (hereafter ASQ) has been mandatory for all travelers wishing to enter Thailand since the first Corona wave. It is a mandatory two-week quarantine in Bangkok, in one of the ‘quarantine hotels’. You can sign up for this as a hotel, but must meet a number of restrictions. You have to pick up the traveler from the airport and transport him/her directly to his/her room. Upon arrival at the hotel a mandatory temperature check. You also get three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. This in my case was placed in front of the door on a chair. At 07:00 breakfast, at 11:00 lunch and at 17:00 dinner. The food was very varied. One time a delicious breakfast of toasted bread, with an egg, sausages and a healthy salad. The other time some kind of goo with wet rice. I’ll spare you the photo though.
Speaking of consumption, tap water is not something you should drink in Thailand. When I walked into my hotel room there were 3 packs of water ready. Each pack contained 12 bottles. If I ran out of water, which I really am a water fanatic, even if I say so myself, I could use the LINE app (bad version of Whatsapp) to message the hotel and they would put a new pack on my chair. Every Thai resident uses the LINE app, if you come here, you should definitely have the LINE app. It’s the communication tool here. And setting it up is very easy, simply create an account, you won’t be spammed with emails and you can sync your contact list with your phone list.
For lunch, the food was often the same, toasted bread mainly and here and there a nasi dish, also very tasty. Dinner was a special case. I thought, I can handle spicy food. Correction, the Dutch form of spicy food. I spent so many evenings with teary eyes, a runny nose and a burned mouth. And those teary eyes were not because I was emotional. The level of spicy food here is really on a different level. A whole other level. That’s why the first Thai word I learned was, “Mai tohng phet maak!” “I don’t want it spicy!” I often ask what the vendor recommends when I want to eat street food. Normally you would ask, do you want spicy or not spicy, it seems to me. But most people see me, as a typical European boy, who apparently don’t eat spicy. Then the first thing they ask is, “No spicy?”. You’d think they’d ask this because of my appearance, but we’re never going to find out….
But back to quarantine. What a terrible word it really is. When I had Corona, I had to spend a week in quarantine, which I thought was doable. But two weeks… The first week and a half I was fortunate enough to be able to watch the Olympics; the time difference with Tokyo was only two hours. That made the quarantine a little more reasonable. In the first few days I started exercising fanatically, to the extent that I could. My travel bag is 17 kilos, and the bag had three different ways of carrying it: as a rolling bag, handbag and backpack. So plenty of levers to lift weights. I did need some imagination to come up with exercises. By the way, I could have borrowed a yoga mat from the hotel for some ground exercises. And I brought push-up bars from home (once purchased because I had a slight wrist injury). But after a week I was completely done with all the pushups, sit-ups, squats, curls and lunges. You don’t exactly get motivated to exercise and the king size bed (which all the rooms had) was just really nice.
All day I was in bed. Watching Netflix on my laptop, doing puzzles (my friends came over to say goodbye the day before I left and they gave me a package of three puzzle books, I haven’t finished the first one yet…), reading a book or learning Thai. “Sawa dii Krab”, “Sa baaii dii mai?”, “Khoen put paasaa angkrit dai mai?”. I think I have a good basis for exchanging a word with the local Thai or Thai.
