Stay healthy and happy during COVID-19 pandemic

Greetings everyone,

This blog is written in a very difficult time for the world--the pandemic of COVID19. Hope you are healthy and mostly well.

I'm one of the lucky few right now that are not in quarantine. I live in Taiwan, where the government takes care of the people. We have a national health system. Before the crazy outbreak of COVID19, our government already was preparing for it. We had experiences from SARS, so people also are extra cautious of virus transmission.

In Taiwan, our government tracks our travel history, which is connected to our National ID, and health records in the national database. This way, we can make sure those who have traveled to places with infected cases can be quarantined for 14 days after returning to Taiwan. Also, they hold press conferences every day, send out alerts through news and tv commercials, as well as through a LINE (the most popular chat app in Taiwan) chatbot, which sends you the latest world outbreak number updates a few times a day.

The information has been very transparent. Our government takes pride of taking care of us. Our president, for example, visits health care workers and mask factories to make sure things are working for this fight against the epidemic.

Chilling out rockclimbing in the Northeast coast of Taiwan

I am lucky! So now I have a few times a week that I work from home; I can mostly still go to the office. Everyone wears masks in public places and trains. They also take your temperatures in public places. I can still travel to scenic outdoors for a break, visit family and friends. In essence, life is normal, except that you need to go line up for receiving masks every once in a while, and that we are avoiding traveling abroad.

I have friends abroad so I'm writing this blog for you :) In the coming few days I will share some tips on how to stay healthy, how to stay/feel connected during social distancing. I will also talk about different ways to express yourself, and find your expression outlet, going inside out to find and express yourself. Lastly, how we stay realistically optimistic. Being practical and realistic is part of our culture, it's what keeps things together now. Perhaps there's something to share about it to the world at this moment.

Being happy and healthy is important for me. I'd like to share how we do that in Taiwan to those of you who are interested :)

Take care,