How to Quarantine in South Korea

Travel? In 2021? Are you mad? 

Perhaps a little. Here's my lowdown of government mandated quarantine in South Korea if you are looking to travel there for ✨tourist purposes✨. I say this because I was the first tourist in Seoul many people had met in nearly two years. The ladies working in the tourist information centres practically had cobwebs on them. 

Genuinely in the corridor on the way to our quarantine hotel room

What you will need to enter Korea as a mythical tourist:

• Flights (or a ferry)
• Negative PCR test (within 48 or 72 hours of arrival), print this out and highlight the word 'negative'
• KETA form: this can be filled in on the KETA app, but I printed out the certificate for customs
• An address in Korea where you will stay post-quarantine
• A Korean resident or national to act as a reference (they will get called and asked if they know you are coming)
• I did not have to arrange a visa because Brits have a 90 day tourist visa automatically
• Travel Insurance - I got asked for this at the airport, I had it but it wasn't printed out which seemed to be a bit of an issue

The airport procedure

This is where is gets a bit Squid Game, although I am loathe to say it, mostly because of the hazmat suits. Disembark your plane and collect your luggage, and then as you approach customs, non-Korean citizens are separated into a different queue where your temperature and paperwork will be checked for quarantine.

Prepare to be shuffled around the airport to various cordoned off locations, it passes the time and helps you feel like there is progress. Don't bother asking any of the airport staff helping you which hotel you will end up at, it's a total lottery and they don't know. 

One thing I missed at Incheon airport was the SIM card stand - there aren't many places to get SIM cards in Korea if you are not a Korean resident. If you have a recent enough phone model, you can purchase an e-sim through Trazy.com or LG U+ online. This will add a virtual SIM to your phone, giving you a Korean number and data to use. I would recommend getting the data+voice e-SIM rather than just data, as you will need a telephone number to check into shops and restaurants to abide by Covid regulations. The benefits are you don't have to do the fiddly work of trying to open up your phone and there's no risk of losing your regular SIM card, too. If your mobile is an older model, look out for the SIM card stall (likely SKT) in the airport to get a short term SIM. 

Next was the bus - at this point you are shepherded by people in full hazmat suits and you are not allowed to remove your mask. One very irate smoker was determined to test this in the few moments we had outside loading our luggage into the bus: it did not end well for the smoker and I wonder if he had any plans to go cold turkey for 10 days before going to Korea. 

The Hotel 

At the hotel I had another PCR test, filled in more forms and paid for my "stay". 

The forms are essentially an agreement not to leave the room for the allotted time and to take health tests (this involves taking your temperature twice a day, everyday, and logging it on a health app). We had to download another app. If I remember correctly, the app on the left was downloaded at the airport, and app on the left at the hotel. 

I don't know the difference so I uploaded my temperature info into both apps

You are able to quarantine with another person so long as they are a family member (I'm not sure how far this extends beyond immediate family - sorry cousins!) and your spouse. I got a discount on the quarantine fees by staying in a joint room for 10 days: approx £1136 for the two of us, which if I remember correctly is a discount of 40% each compared to staying in separate rooms.

As it is South Korea, I was banking on there being excellent internet connection in the hotel: I was not disappointed. There were two of us on international video calls (an absolute mare in one room) with no problems. 

Weird features of the stay include speaker announcements inside the room three times a day reminding guests to NEVER LEAVE THEIR ROOM, to not open the window too wide, and to not smoke.

Highlights of the quarantine was definitely the view. Although balcony-less and unable to open the window fully without a finger-wagging from the policeman below - I was able to watch the sunrise over Incheon in the East and set over the island we were on in the West, all the time tracking its way over the ocean and Incheon bridge. The outside became another world, like the other side of a mirror, full of observable but unreachable tiny figures, birds, and, occasionally, some cats.

 

Food

There were "no beef", "no pork" and vegetarian options available when checking into the quarantine hotel. If you are vegetarian - prepare to have protein sources replaced by bread rolls. I have included a photo below of the four-carb dinner comprised of boiled rice, potato curry, a hash brown and a bread roll. 

It's surreal to hear the doorbell ring at the same time each day, and have bags of food mystically appear outside. Food was generally good - lots of pickles - and in a good quantity so you won't go hungry. 

We did need to order extra water via the telephone as we were given one 500ml bottle of water per meal, which was not enough for this thirsty ho.

 

Leaving

Departing the hotel was a rather unceremonious affair. Of course, the first time I had been outside in 10 days and it was pouring with rain. 

A few days before release, we were given the options of having either, some one collect us from the hotel in a vehicle, or get dropped off at a nearby train station by the hotel minibus. We plumped for the public transport option. On the 10th day of quarantine, I was packed and ready to say goodbye to my prison cell hotel room at the pre-allotted time of 8am. And from the moment you leave the room, it's face masks all the way. 

Given that so much paper work is needed to enter the hotel, it felt very strange to be leaving without even a signature. And with that, we were off into the big, wide world of South Korea. 

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll do my best to answer. Although I will caveat that this experience is time-bound to late 2021 and travel restrictions and regulations will change. 

CCP: The Chinese Consumerist Party?

In the 1980s, the average Chinese found the money in their pockets growing and saw the emergence of a market for consumer products. Demand for the new 'Big Three’ (a refrigerator, a washing machine and a television set) replaced the practically provincial previous big three, namely a bicycle, a wristwatch and a sewing machine. As Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping put it: to get rich is glorious (致富光荣 zhìfù guāngróng), 

Three decades on, the 'communist' country's administration is simultaneously trying to rein in the culture of hyper-materialism, where girls declare they would "rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on a bicycle," while trying tempt the Chinese people to stop saving and spend more. 

China is currently trying to make the leap between a manufacturing economy to one led by domestic consumerism. By western standards, the mainland Chinese aren't big spenders, tending to keep a large proportion of funds stashed away. Figures suggest household consumption accounted for 35% of the Chinese economy in 2010, compared to 71% in the US. 

But to those with the means (and some without) designer clothes, fast cars, foreign brands and luxurious holidays are the mark of fashionable modern China. And today's Big Three? Men have to own a car, a house and have a well paying job to even think of finding a wife. 

One driver of consumerism in China is the birth of online shopping. Sites like Taobao, Jingdong, T-Mall, Alibaba have changed the face of Chinese retail. Go to a local market and you'll see how tactile and in-your-face Chinese shoppers can be: they touch everything, they inspect it, they insult it, they bargain over it. While some analysts said the Chinese would never take to online shopping because it doesn't allow them to see and feel what they are buying, the truth is cash is king. 

Bargains galore have drawn millions of Chinese to splash their cash online, and e-commerce has other benefits, too. Many of China's disabled community have taken to running online stores for living as they can face stigma, restrictions and competition in the workplace.  Changes are also spreading to China's remote rural villages, with Taobao recruiting "rural partners" to bring the internet age to the elderly and technologically disadvantaged. Given the growth China's e-commerce platforms have seen, it's incredible to realise there is still much room for growth in the provincial and agricultural areas. In 2010, 1.6 million people worked in e-commerce firms, ballooning to 2.5 million in June 2015. A further 18 million work in related businesses, such as postal services. 

Such huge changes in shopping habits have concomitantly given online retail platforms the power to shape culture: the 11 November is known in China as Singles Day, which has become an online shopping frenzy to eclipse even Black Friday. This holiday was created as a joke less than 25 years ago in campuses in Nanjing because of the appearance of the date (11.11) looking like four solo stick figures and, after all, one is the loneliest number. Yet in 2015, this "joke" led to USD 14.3 billion in online sales thanks to yearly pushes and huge discounts since 2009 led by e-commerce sites such as Alibaba. In 2015, Alibaba drummed up shopping fever with a TV-extravaganza featuring international stars such as Kevin Spacey and Daniel Craig. 

But what does 14.3 billion dollars look like? It's a sum that is difficult for humans to compute, but it is much easier to picture how e-commerce has crept into modern Chinese life. A collection by photographer Huang Qingjun shows families from across China posing next to everything they owned bought on Taobao, each photograph telling a tale of commodity, convenience and character. 

In some ways, online shopping is more advanced in China's urban centres than it is in America and Europe. The innovation driving WeChat is blurring the boundaries of retail, social media and online messaging. If the drive of e-commerce and  hyper-materialism shows no signs of slowing, what does this mean for China as a whole? Website Chinafile asks some pertinent questions of this pursuit of Stuff: 

How much can Chinese consumers afford to spend given the nation’s lack of a social safety net? Moreover, how much consumption can China’s environment handle and is there a magic number that signals China’s people are consuming enough to keep the economy from tanking without simultaneously killing themselves with pollution? 

(Images excluding Mao are from a collection called Totems by Alain Delorme to highlight consumerism in China)

8 Alternative Books on China You Haven't Heard Of

Approach the 'China' section of a bookshop and immediately you are struck by the overall redness of the area. It seems there are no books about China that aren't crimson and adorned with a dragon and/or Chinese flag. Maybe a picture of Mao for good measure. They all have titles like The Dragon Wakes, China Shakes the World or The China Boom. There is no Wild Swans or The Last Emperor here. 

But lets look past "China" to the individuals that make up this vast kingdom; where are the books about current subcultures, trends, phenomenons affecting everyday life? Where are the stories about and by the common people of China: what they like, desire, fear, experience and do to stay afloat in the shifting sands of this rapidly changing country?

I've picked out 8 books; some I have read, some I have been to talks by the author, and some I have listened to reviews on podcasts, and some are just on my reading list. But all cover aspects of life in modern China that economic and international relations books would skim over but are by far the most interesting part of studying China and Chinese (to me at least).

1. Little Emperors and Material Girls: Youth and Sex in Modern China by Jemimah Steinfeld - A look at young people's sex lives, family ties, material desires and strangely enough, patriotism through anecdotal stories and observations.
2. Notes from Beijing Coffeeshop by Jon Geldart - Geldart has spent over five years in Beijing conversing with Chinese business leaders, opinion formers and ordinary Chinese mainly in coffee shops and tea houses. His observations, stories and profiles are a gateway to seeing how people are really do business and living in the new China.
3. Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China by Leslie T. Chang - Through the lives of two young women, Chang vividly portrays the struggles of millions of migrant workers who leave their rural towns to find jobs in the cities, driving China’s economic boom. 
4. I Am China by Xiaolu Guo - Guo is a director and author censored and monitored in her homeland for her more subversive works, and I Am China is no different, telling the fictional tale of two lovers, separated by distance and an oppressive political regime, desperate to find their way back to each other. 
5. Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scenes by Heather Inwood - Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. 
6. Buying Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery in China by Hua Wen - Hua explores how turbulent economic, sociocultural, and political changes in China since the 1980s have produced immense anxiety that is experienced both mentally and corporeally. Cosmetic surgery in China has grown rapidly in recent years of dramatic social transition. Facing fierce competition in all spheres of daily life, more and more women consider cosmetic surgery as an investment to gain "beauty capital" to increase opportunities for social and career success. 
7. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos - Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that unfold on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world’s largest authoritarian regime. Together they describe the defining clash taking place today: between the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. 
8. Modern China: All That Matters by Jonathan Clements - I know I said I was going for personal stories, but Modern China: All That Matters covers key issues of national reconstruction that shape Chinese people; the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and the dizzying spectacle of China's economic reform. Clements offers a Chinese perspective on such events as the Handover of Hong Kong, and chronicles the historical events that continue to resonate today in Chinese politics, economics, culture and quality of life.

If you have any more recommendations, please comment below!