Even More Covid Tests, The New Normal?

August 16^th Oh what a lovely day, test nine today, only photos come from there.

The supermarket and hospital were still not open so that was the end of our interesting day.

August 17^th Yet another test, number ten. Today we were not allowed into the place we usually go for testing, we had to queue outside instead.

Shops are not allowed to open fully, but with some you might be able to still do business.

Just after this we tried our first medicine shop for my monthly meds; they could only provide three out of seven, three that I wasn’t really short of yet. We headed towards the Chinese Medicine hospital passing our gate on the way. “You won’t get far” said Zhao De.

He was wrong; we were able to walk to the hospital, through a dead town.

Inside the Chinese Medicine hospital they had these wonderful bas-reliefs, two of which you can see here, but still not enough of the medicines I needed.

Walking back through town we did manage to find one medicine shop that had everything I needed, not a wasted journey then. We also passed the closed indoor market and another ‘half open’ shop. Tomorrow, they will be fully closed too.

On the final stretch home we did manage to find wildlife for you, a rather odd looking worm. We decided that this one was best left untouched!

Within minutes of being home we had a phone call to ask if we were home and had we been for our tests today. It seems someone with a ‘red’ health code had tried to sneak past our gate. Luckily Huan and I are still ‘green’.

Just to make my day a crown fell off one of my teeth, well it came off while I was chewing some raisins and broke on the way. Guess what? No dentists open until we finish with this lockdown.

August 18^th Yet again it was a test day, this time number eleven and back at the same spot, where we had to be tested outside.

Just to make sure we got something else this week we took some flower photos. Maybe I should have taken the Fuji with me because the phone didn’t do such a good job. In fact it seems that macro mode today was far worse than normal mode.

August 19^th This morning saw a very frustrated Bob trying not to get angry with wifey. She had heard the loudspeaker van today advising us that more tests were needed. Going to the usual place we discovered no medical teams in place at all. What’s more shops appeared to be opening up and other people were telling us, without any evidence, that testing was over. Some of them had heard the loudspeaker van too! The frustration came from the fact that no one seems to either want to phone someone to find out what’s going on or perhaps they have no phone number to call! We walked back through town to check which shops were and weren’t open, along with the market and of course dentists. Tomorrow, we should be able to do a little shopping again.

August 20^th We were back to the new ‘normal’ today. Last night we heard the loudspeaker van and it even woke us up this morning. Yes, we had to go off for test number twelve, for us, eleven for the sticker brigade. After our tests we thought we would go and see if the Saturday market was back, checking on the fishing on the way.

The market was noticeable by its absence.

We were being tested again today because there had been a positive case on the 18^th, probably reported too late for yesterday’s round of tests. We wondered if they were in here, the Fodelai hotel, which is now a quarantine hotel.

With the lack of photo-opportunities this week I thought you deserved to see rather more of this car than just a collage. If someone gave me this as a gift I would not complain at all! It is a Bentley Continental GT V8 probably from 2016. Although we have obscured the plates we can tell you that it probably came here from Hong Kong.

Some good news did come from our walk; although the market was closed we could get into the bap seller’s apartment complex which meant we could buy a duck for today’s and tomorrow’s dinner. Also I got to catch up with a few of my four legged friends who were almost as pleased to see me as I was to see them. A quick visit to the supermarket, which is open as normal again, to buy milk then the bakery to buy chocolate cake and our Saturday was over.

PS Our new camera has still not been despatched yet. A chat with the supplier resulted in him asking us to check back on Monday. I told him, or her, that an unsatisfactory answer then would result in cancellation of the order. We’ll wait and see, again.

August 21^st No tests required this morning. However, inclement weather kept us in all day.

August 22^nd No tests were needed again today, that had me wondering if we were back to normal. Being Monday it was a shopping day so off we went. Our first stop was Huan’s bank where the ATMs were out of money and the counters were closed, something to do with their #1 bank being in Baoting. I didn’t understand the reasoning at all. Baijiahui, the supermarket was fine although a few items were missing from the shelves. As we often do we then went to the town indoor market to buy some fish. To our surprise the market was still closed and the road past the front blocked. I guess someone may have tested positive in that area. No worries, we had tinned fish with our left over weekend salad for dinner.

After dinner the loudspeaker van passed by again, we all have to have another test tomorrow morning. It would appear that life is not quite back to normal yet or maybe that we have a new normal now. The news did say that the government was going to try and balance its covid control response with the economic needs from now on.

That’s the end of this week’s post, even smaller and with fewer photos than previous weeks. We live in hope that life will change for the better soon and we are thankful that in our city, we have not had any real problems. Until the next time, auf wiedersehen!