Fourteentine, Taiwanese bureaucracy and loneliness

I started typing this entry in the middle of the mandatory 14-day quarantine* imposed by Taiwan on anyone entering the country, and never really got to complete it, even when I was trapped in that hotel room 24/7. As everything in life, while in quarantine it felt like it would never end (the day after it finished, my feeling was even a bit surreal and I felt kind of afraid of having to face the outside world), but now it feels like it went by in the blink of an eye. I guess all I can complain about was the absurdly high price of the quarantine hotel, but at least I was treated well and really had all I needed to make it through.

For some reason I sometimes feel that writing in here does not make sense at all, and some others I feel that not only is it good for me mentally but it leaves some more permanent information about my thoughts when I'm gone, or when I might need to recall some things. I'm, at least at this second, trying to commit myself to write at least once a week, without caring much about detail, which is, I think, what deters me in the first place from writing or at least keeps me from concluding whatever thought process I want to capture in writing. I guess I just have to forget a bit about style detail and precision when it comes to this thing.

Anyhow, my first status complain is that bureaucracy in Taiwan is an absolute drag. It's funny because I used to think about Taiwan as some very technologically advanced country which would have automated many things and would be very efficient in dealing with many formalities. This is just not so, and some things even seem to make little sense. To be fair, many things do work to a great extent like the strictness they've had with covid-19 and so on. Anyhow, I concluded my quarantine on May the 4th and got sorted almost all bureaucratic chores I needed to. I'm very much looking forward to resuming my life.

While being a postdoc abroad definitely feels different to being a PhD student abroad because of the professional part, there are things in personal life that do feel like going back in time in a negative way. And this is especially true if one is single (i.e. not married) and faces being in a new place with no acquaintances; add to this the unusual circumstance where you're required to initially isolate yourself at least for 22 days and things get a bit worse. And don't get me wrong, it's great to have a life experience like this and being able to live in different places and truly immerse yourself in a totally different environment, but I guess at some point it feels a bit exhausting, even more if you feel that you actually can't call this or that place home.

Today I was particularly reminded of this because I grabbed my camera and went out to check Taipei 101 (台北101) and Elephant Mountain (象山). This kind of reminded me of some shitty times in Melbourne by my own, even when actually trying some photography sort of helped me feel better back then. It also somehow intensified the uneasiness of being in a long-distance relationship (LDR). As I tried to elaborate some entries below, it's just impossible to remain the same person and there is just no way of genuinely sharing feelings all the time when both eventually live through entirely different things. Now, surely some people can empathise better than others, and I guess the first is the type that eventually make it through in LDRs.

* Quarantine literally implies a 40-day isolation period. In Spanish this is easily adapted to imply a 14-day period turning the word 'cuarentena' into 'catorcena'. Or well, okay, maybe not.