[KMag]

My wife and I lived and worked the first two weeks of December in precautionary quarantine, unable to leave an 86 square foot area, along with our luggage from a 1 month trip. I was within a couple of inches of being able to touch opposite walls (the narrow way) with my finger tips. Hong Kong changed the rules from quarantine-at-home to hotel quarantine while we were out. (We booked a place 2.25x as big, but had a problem with our booking 6 hours before check-in and had to find another booking last-minute.)

I thought I might go stir crazy or have elevated levels of conflict with my wife, but it worked out okay. On the other hand, I can understand why the Council of Europe deems 8 sq. m. (86 sq. ft.) the minimum prison cell size for two prisoners.

[LeifCarrotson]

Wow, I don't think I have ever seen an 86 square foot hotel room. I live in what's locally a small, 50-year-old suburban ranch home in the Midwestern US, but even my guest bathroom is at least that big. That really drives home the disparity behind the "we're all in the same boat" memes where one boat is a yacht and one's a castaway raft - though most seaworthy rafts are on the order 86 square feet...

For me, quarantine was the best couple months of my recent working life. My home office is way nicer (quieter, fewer interruptions, better computer and peripherals, better chair etc) than my work office, I got to have brunch, lunch, and an afternoon snack with my kids, had no commute, played fetch with the dog or took walks in the woods for breaks, got a ton of projects done around the house and in the workshop, played with my kid in his play room, and I'm a bit of an introverted hermit so being home without a stream of social visitors was really a cherry on top.

I don't know how to properly say sorry or thank you to urbanites for whom quarantine was more like a prison experiment. I guess I'll try with "I'm sorry that your experience was so difficult. Thank you so much for caring and for going through that quarantine."

[gommm]

Wow, that must have been rough, I was lucky in that I came back just before they changed to the hotel only quarantine. One of my friend had to go through hotel quarantine and ended up getting a windowless bedroom during the entire 14 days (the hotel website definitely didn't mention that when booking).

By the way, always fun to meet people from HN in HK, so shoot me an email and we could have lunch or drinks after the fourth wave is over.

[KMag]

When we came back, it was the period where (if you arrived in the evening), you'd spend the first night in a government hotel, and then 13 nights in any hotel that would take you. At 2 a.m. in the government hotel, we discovered a problem with our booking the next day. We called up one hotel's front desk at 3 a.m., and the poor guy on duty told us they accepted quarantine guests. We kept trying to get our original booking problem ironed out for the next 6 hours, but eventually gave up at 9 a.m.

Luckily, we gave the second hotel's front desk a second call at 9 a.m. to double-check they accepted quarantine guests before making our online booking. The day shift guy who came in told us that they didn't accept quarantine guests.

Now, it's a bit better organized, with an official government list of all acceptable quarantine hotels. Though, prices have gone up significantly for those few hotels. When we arrived, there was a government list, but it was just a subset of all hotels accepting quarantine guests, and of course prices shot up and vacancies vanished for those hotels on the government list.