Until the virus pandemic struck Uruguay in mid March, I and a group of other expat women gathered to play mahjong every week. Most of us are seniors 60-70+ and additionly some of us live with spouses and partners with co-morbidities. So since last March 13th we’ve been self isolating and unable to play, but we’ve continued to meet weekly to chat on Skype at our regular mahjong time. We’ve become used to the masks, handwashing/sanitizing/distancing/small gatherings rules and procedures of living in this pandemic, and now, with Spring here and the weather warming, some of us will be ready soon to play mahjong together most likely outside in shady venues.
Roxy, a Costa Rican, played mahjong with our group during the couple of years she and her husband were in Montevideo. In January, just as the virus was preparing to spread like wildfire around the globe, Stewart accepted an appointment to an international school near Shanghai, and it was with sadness we prepared to farewll Roxy. We always give a farewell lunch to farewell departing players, generally on a sunday with the husbands joining in. This time it was just most of the girls, on our usual day, for a pot luck lunch with masks and sanitiser on arrival, distancing and self serving everything. Of course I was a bit nervous at this first ‘hostessing’ event inside our house since the pandemic’s arrival, but it was a success, and no one brought the virus or took it away that day 🙂
I’ll skip over Roxy and Stewart’s tortuous experiences of obtaining all the necssary paperwork to go to China and work. The convoluted bureaucratic process took months, involving UY government departments and several embassies, all frought with hitches and delays due to difficulties presented by the pandemic. Packing up their stuff all went smoothly, but there were several flight cancellations before they actually found themselves on one of the infrequent flights out to UK, 2 weeks’ quarantine, China and another quarantine.
They were fortunate, taking only 7 months or so to accomplish all that. Many of the international staff and students are still struggling, stranded, since January, in countries around the world. Presenting the teaching program over Zoom means long days for Stewart teaching and managing students across multiple time zones, and Roxy finds herself in the unaccustomed role of being chief cook during the week. She’s never made a secret of being a poor and not particulary keen cook, which until now was never a problem, since Stewart is very good and enthusiastic over things culinary; perhaps not surprisingly, as his discipline is chemistry 🙂
Their furnished apartment was like a holiday apartment with bare basics provided in the kitchen, leaving them to shop around for more of what they need. There was a kettle and just one cooking pot, for example. Plus, one hotplate of the two was concave, specifically for the round bottomed wok, how interesting and fantastic! It’s probably an everyday normal thing for Chinese people to have a stove-top with a ‘wokplate’ and they’d have arrived with a wok in their household gear; but there wasn’t a wok in the apartment, and it took a couple of shopping trips to find one – pictured.
When you move from one country to another or even across country if it’s big enough, like Australia, you expect many details of daily life will be different; and small things can become large in importance. Food labels and signs are all in Chinese of course, and so far Roxy’s found some shopping’s a bit hit-and-miss, pictures on the outsides of packaging not always being a fair guide to what’s inside! So for the moment everything is a huge learning curve, not least of which is learning to cook food in the wok, but the cooks in the mahjong group are on standby with guidance and encouragement.
