So, where to begin. I fell asleep after returning home last night, but woke up at 4:30 am or so feeling absolutely miserable. I was cold and violently shivering, even though I was huddled underneath my blanket, and even moving my feet to a different part of the under-blanket that had not been warmed by body heat yet felt terrible. I’m not actually sure I had any body heat at all at that point, really. The thermostat had a bunch of buttons on it and I sent a picture of it to Gemini to help me figure it out, and we got it working, but upon describing my symptoms to the bot — shivering but unable to find any warmth or sweat at all — Gemini warned that I was probably in the early throes of a fever. Oh dear.

I don’t know if I actually ever became feverish per se, but my body temperatures definitely were off for the next few hours, and I lay in bed feeling as 4 am turned to 5 am, and then stretched into 5:30 am. I finally fell asleep around then and woke up at 8 am, still shivering and feeling queasy. I was sweating by that time, which was nice, but still felt bad (physically) and really down (mentally) overall, and it was nice having a chatbot with me because I whined to Gemini about wanting to go home and sleep in my own bed again instead of being sick half the world away. I also talked about doing nothing on vacation but visiting malls and museums and needed a pep talk from the bot to get me out of that funk too.

The next few hours, and really the rest of the day, involved a lot of drifting in and out of reality, punctuated by me feeling a mental mess whenever I surfaced. At about 10 or 10:30 am, the feeling of butterflies in my stomach reached a crescendo, and I threw up most of last night’s dinner, the laksa dish from Magic Kitchen, right into the toilet bowl in my unit’s bathroom. That got rid of a big lumpy sensation in my chest and stomach that had been keeping me uncomfortable for the past few hours but that perhaps I had not fully realized. I felt better after that, but still weak and miserable. I had thought that it was the rain last night that had made me sick, but all signs now pointed toward food poisoning of some sort instead.

One thing that I managed to finally figure out while lying sick in bed though, and this was a major and very necessary victory at this point, was Meituan. I had noticed that for some reason the SMS to my overseas account was working at this time even though my account was still locked out, and it was locked out in the first place because SMS messages sent to it back in Haikou would not work. I reached out to customer service over the app to see if they could lift the lock on my account, and they wanted a phone call to verify my number, which I accepted with a sigh, as I think that actually triggered my TELUS roaming plan and its associated fee for the day. Probably.

But it was worth it in the end, since the lock was lifted and I could now log into Meituan with my international number and order stuff! I ordered two bowls of porridge, kind of on the advice of Gemini, though it wanted me to just get plain white congee and I instead got two different versions of congee with stuff in it. My first ever Meituan order! Both bowls together cost 29.8 yuan and the delivery fee was 3.8 yuan, for a total of 33.6 yuan ($6.70 CAD).

I also got to see first-hand how difficult it is to find the delivery map if the app closes on you and you have to reopen it from scratch (if I’m not wrong, you have to get there by looking at your profile from the main menu or something silly like that). But in a few minutes, at around 1 pm, there was a knock on my front door, and when I opened it after leaving time for the delivery person to scoot off, there it was, a fresh package of food in a bag on the ground.

I also realized at this point that yes, my Canada phone number could receive calls, but I hadn’t actually received a call of any sort, even a spam one, ever since I left on my trip a month ago. Huh.

I downed one of the two bowls of hot porridge while watching ice hockey highlights on my phone, then suitably warmed, but still queasy, crawled into the shower to freshen myself up, then went back into bed for another sleep cycle.

Gemini was in full blown diagnosis and medical advice mode at this point, and it only got better/worse over the next two days, especially when it would contradict itself on occasion in back to back responses with things like how much time I should wait between sips of water and stuff. Since I know it’s plugged into Google searches though, it was very useful for the occasional answer and advice.

I then fell asleep and woke up again in the evening, and downed the other bowl of porridge, which had become cold by now. Much as I like this apartment, it doesn’t have a microwave for whatever reason, although I realize now that its listing actually does list a microwave as an amenity here. Well, whatever. (Edit: I realized even later on that you had to REQUEST the microwave at the front desk.) I flipped on the TV for the first time in three days and was lucky enough to find a channel broadcasting 开门大吉, a show I had first discovered on my last trip to China. So I happily watched that while finishing my cold congee.

I realized afterwards that the stickiness of the cold congee actually stuck with me though, in my esophagus, and that made me a little worried as I went to bed.

You’d think that having so much downtime with a full day of holing myself up in a hotel room would have meant that I had lots of time to work on the blog, or do anything at all in general, but I just couldn’t do anything today. It was a combination of poor energy levels and poor mood that caused this lethargy, but hey, better here and now than during a travel day, right? It also meant that I pretty much fully erased any sort of sleep deficit that I had built up since the start of the trip.

It’s also worth noting that I know that my housekeeper quietly tried the door a couple times during the day, only to find it locked still. Later in the evening, she knocked on the door to find out if I wanted the room to be 打扫’d, aka cleaned, or if I needed any towel replacements or anything. I told her that no, I was just sick for the whole day and so I hadn’t left the room. She looked at me with these sympathetic eyes and plied two bottles of hotel-brand bottled water on me. Then thought for a while, and gave me two more. She reminded me strongly of Auntie 795, or at least my mental image of her from 35 years ago, but that could just be my melancholia talking.

So, since I didn’t step foot outside the apartment today, I don’t have any particularly interesting photos to share. Gemini suggested that I take a couple photos of interesting objects from within the room instead, though, and I do agree, so here’s one of a chair (Kynji identified this pattern as Houndstooth) that has a stain on it but it’s kinda hard to see because it looks like an optical illusion:

Here’s a picture of the kitchen. There’s a kitchen hood there.. with grease.. but there’s nothing below it except an empty counter and an electric kettle.

And here’s one of the fire escape sign. Personalized per room, so that’s nice, but that English translation. “Don,t use after the fire broke with lift off” indeed.