I’ll leave the details of the quarantine hotel that I am staying at until I leave but it seems the experience is different for different people.

Mrs Jones is in an International brand hotel and has been there a week now. Her greatest grievance being all the packaging waste.

It is somewhat ironic that room service is common in these kinds of hotels but that the decision taken by each hotel appears to be one more aligned with packed lunches.

Mrs Jones gets a couple of bento style boxes each day, the same way you might get a TV dinner or tray meal at boarding school, university or … prison.

The rest of the experience is your typical hotel except your room is unserviced and you are not allowed to wander the corridors of the hotel or leave your room.

The hotel’s typically also don’t have windows that open so you’re trapped in a box with or without a view, with climate control switches to full bore or off.

Arriving in the late afternoon I was ferried with about a dozen other people to my quarantine hotel and filled out a bunch of paperwork and then was escorted to my room.

As I said, the room is pretty typical but the rest isn’t.

My first meal, dinner, was squid with rice, accompanied by a miso soup and strawberry cheesecake.

The food was pretty bland, low salt, low spice. I wish I brought salt and chili flakes.

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The squid was ok, not too chewy, but about two cups of cooked rice, way too much. If I ate all on offer I’d probably double my weight!

The packaging though is worth a special mention. Cane sugar fiber box with a lid 👏, and a coated cardboard bucket for the soup with a polystyrene lid 😒. The dessert was delivered in a type 6 recyclable namely polystyrene 😡

Everything came in a poly bag with a room number, I will be using these as bin bags though I wish they were made of compostable polyethelene free material.