And Just Like That.....

We got a message from Jacky late on Saturday afternoon saying that the quarantine rules in Changzhou had changed again.  

This time in our favor. 

We were to get ready to leave the next day! (Sunday May 22, it was supposed to be the 27th.)

We packed up as much as we could on Saturday night so we didn't have too much work on Sunday.  Thankfully the time worked out that we could still 'attend' our church meetings.  (A post on that will come at some point, I'm sure.)  

We were told that we needed to be ready to leave by 1:30.  Of course we were so excited, we were ready well before that.  With the rule change, many others also got to leave earlier than their day.  We watched from above as a dozen or so people and cars were waiting to pick up people.  Thankfully we had that bit of entertainment or we might have gone crazy waiting!  The knock on our door didn't come until 3:30.  

We were escorted to the elevator, went outside to pay the bill (ұ17,200 for 21 days + 9 food trays a day) and wheeled to the curb!  And just like that, we were out!

As Jacky says, "You've graduated from quarantine."  Goodbye Grand Soluxe!

Stella, the company executive assistant and Wang Jian, our driver met us.  Stella piled the 4 of us into the van and said she'd get a taxi and bring all of our luggage.  We wondered how in the world that would work as all of our luggage didn't fit in a car.  But, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore, so we went with it!

We will do much of our traveling via the company van and driver.  We won't complain about that! It is a really nice van, the middle seats in the back are recliner chairs with leg rests, heat, cool and massage! The driver's camera views when signaling or backing up are amazing!  It has an aerial view of the van and things around it--bikes, people, cars, including the lines on the street/parking spaces. It also has a front camera; if he's in a tight space going forward, he can turn on the front camera as well. All pretty cool.

We got to our apartment and met Sherry, Tom's accounting assistant, who took us up to the apartment. We were introduced to our land lady. Eventually Stella arrived and we went down to help her up with the luggage.  She had called a van taxi!  (Which makes sense that they would have--most people only have scooters here, so van taxis would be needed on occasion.)

After they got us settled in and told us how everything works, Sherry ordered us some food.  We let Tessa pick the cuisine since she had only eaten rice + snacks for  24 days.  She picked sushi.  She was in heaven in more ways than one!  I won't lie, it truly was divine to be eating something besides boiled lettuce, rice and indistinguishable meat dishes!

After we ate, we left most of the unpacking to do since it was the Sabbath, we had our Come Follow Me study and went for a walk.  All a truly wonderful day!!  Now on to other inevitable adventures!!!

In other good news, the 6 required PCR tests over the next month have also been removed.  We're super happy about that!

A note I want to record:  we knew coming here that we would have to have multiple nasal swabs done and we had heard that the Chinese administered ones were extremely unpleasant--the worst many had experienced.  Knowing that, we were prepared for truly awful.  In our experience, they were indeed very pleasant, but not awful.  That said, the ones we got at the Grand Soluxe were among the worst we had received up to that point and we had to have them daily for the first week and every few days after that (we could never figure out the pattern).  But as we were very gracious to the workers, and I started putting thank you notes on the door, the tests became much more gentle.  By the time we left, they were so gentle and kind to us.  We really just wanted them to feel light from us.  I hope that was the message they received! They seemed genuinely happy to get a little thank you from us.  (If not, I had fun painting!)