Escape from Beijing?

We’ve been visiting my wife’s sister and brother-in-law in Beijing for the last four days. We had originally planned to go back to Shanghai on the 27^th but we decided to move our return up for a few reasons. We’d heard through the family grapevine (cousin’s uncle’s brother twice removed etc…) that there has been some consideration to locking down Shanghai in the same way Wuhan and its neighboring cities have been locked down and the thought of spending a few weeks in Beijing playing Mahjong all day long every day is more time than my wife and I want to spend in Beijing. There’s also the element of being on home ground when confronting a virus. If one has to deal with a flu epidemic, it’s much better to do it from the comforts of home and the neighborhood you know.

For all those reasons, we switched our train tickets. Thanks to the wonders of social harmony, the railway company is not making anyone pay for refunds and offering free date alterations on prepaid tickets so we switched over to January 26th. My wife wondered if we should get the earliest train possible but I told her that there was no way she was going to get up at five in the morning so no point. Also as a foreigner in China, I cannot use my passport to board trains in the same way that Chinese can use their national ID cards so I have to get an actual printout of the ticket. Since the ticket office doesn’t open before eight o’clock in the morning, there’s no way I can get a 7 a.m. train so we changed to the 12 pm train.

This morning, we woke up earlier than we had been this holiday. I checked my masters’ website for new contributions from my fellow students on the forums, made a few comments and then we finished packing up. While we were waiting, my wife’s sister informed her that they had heard that the building managers were going around checking the temperature of everyone in the buildings that form the residential compound where we were staying. Since we don’t officially live there and were staying at her sister’s extra apartment, this could have created some awkwardness. Fortunately, the building managers never appeared and our in-laws drove us to Beijing train station.  Everyone at the station was wearing masks and the boards showing train capacity informed us that many of the trains had hundreds of empty seats, a first during the Spring Festival I’m sure.

Despite everything we’ve heard about lockdowns and checking people’s temperatures, there was no health inspection on our way out of Beijing. I told my wife that it was possible they were only checking the people coming into the city, figuring that anyone leaving would be the destination city’s problem. As I type this, we are in the train heading to Shanghai so I will see what kind of set up they have for those entering the city.

 Well we’ve now arrived home and it’s a bit anticlimactic to say that we entered Shanghai without any hassle whatsoever. Despite the gossip on social media, I didn’t see anything remotely resembling health checkups. Also contrary to social media, the supermarkets are as stocked as they always are with food, although our local supermarket has removed its fresh vegetables section, which is a bit annoying as they don’t sell packaged vegetables so we’ll have to go shopping tomorrow. All public venues such as museums, cinemas and such are closed and we’ll probably be staying in for the most part which will give plenty of time to keep up my studying, writing and gaming. I may even work in some exercising. The city has announced that all middle schools, primary schools and kindergartens are not allowed to reopen until the 17^th of February so I have an extra two weeks of holiday, though probably unpaid.

I would like to assure everyone that my wife and I are healthy and glad to be home and I will post updates to life in a flue epidemic as they come. For some reason, I have an urge to write a storyline about a plague in the novel I’m working on at the moment. Don’t know where these ideas come from.