While being strictly quarantined in a hotel room can be welcome as an opportunity to work on personal interests that you otherwise have to make time for, it is a challenge to your mental well-being. Stepping out of the room is simply not an option because it’s illegal and punishable by the law in some countries at this point. So literally left to your “devices” in your room all day, for two weeks, what do you do other than poke around on them?
Well, for starters, you end up talking to yourself quite a bit. While that can be disconcerting in better times, there isn’t much choice when you’re the only one in the room, and you don’t want to be exhausting your friends and relatives with lamentations about the food. And yes, when you’re alone and stuck in a room, for fourteen days, mealtimes are the high points of the day, much like when you’re in a hospital room or airplane. Ah! The sweet sound of the trundle of the food trolley is just music. If the cuisine that is provided is not exactly delectable, you turn to food delivery services. Believe me, browsing through menus of different restaurants is very exciting, and makes the quarantine situation far more palatable. However it can starve your pocket a bit because the delivery service fees can add up. So you end up staring at your phone like you’re staring at the ticker monitor, and then at the right moment when it's off-peak, and the delivery fee comes down, you exclaim, “Buy! Buy! Buy now!”
So, what else do you in a room that’s about the size of a reasonably large master bedroom for 14 days? Activities like writing, singing or reading, depending on your interests, can keep you busy but since we’re such social animals, at some point you do miss talking. Well, I have discovered that soliloquizing about various things can prove to be quite entertaining since no one questions you or your logic. So there you go, thinking aloud about subjects ranging from the search for truth to the hospitality industry, and how they need to realize that their real bosses are their customers, to toilet seat liners. Yes, the last one on that list is a little…well...out of place but have you ever wondered, why they make those things with the flimsiest of tracing paper, and more often than not they come out of that packet on the wall in pieces, and by the time you have successfully arranged those pieces on the toilet seat you have touched all over the seat and …hm…I ramble.