First the flight cancellations​

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Two different flights to Shanghai were canceled.

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Then I booked flights around Shanghai going to Beijing, then Taipei.

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Then my flight to Beijing was canceled.

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I booked another flight to Beijing.

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This morning I discovered that that flight was canceled but I was rebooked automatically on another flight leaving two hours earlier at noon tomorrow. If that holds, then so far so good.

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Then I lost my Schwab debit card, along with my Chinese bank card and Kunming subway card

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Yesterday, when Holly and I were going here and there trying to resolve a Health Code problem on my mobile, I discovered my cards were missing from my shoulder bag. "I must have left them at home," I hopefully thought to myself. Back home I searched in all the possible places I could have put those cards down (they were clipped together). No luck. I can't go to Colombia without my debit card to get money from the ATM! 

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I always carefully put those cards in a special pocket of my shoulder bag. I thought back and retraced my steps, thinking that I might have inadvertently pulled those cards out of that pocket when I was getting something else out, like my set of keys which I have to take out to operate the elevator when I leave my building. I thought to myself, "Holly and I were getting ready to leave. I started to remove my keys from the bag maybe before I exited my apartment door, maybe afterward." I retraced my steps down my apartment stairs and up to the door of my apartment, looking everywhere on the floor. No keys. I opened the apartment door and looked around on the floor of the outside hallway (shared by five other tenants). My cards, all three of them, were still right there on the outside-my-apartment hallway floor exactly where I had accidentally pulled them out of my bag while retrieving my keys! OMG!

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New resolution: take a new level of care when removing things from that pocket of your bag.

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My Health Code won't show on my mobile phone

 

Especially with the current covid crisis here in China, if you want to travel anywhere, you've got to show your health code again and again. Last Wednesday Heidi discovered that my Health Code would not show on my phone. She started working on trying to fix the problem. Among other things, she got a new wechat account going for me, thinking that might help. She even tried to get an Alipay account working for me. Nothing worked. I talked with my friend Salomea, a guru about many things Chinese. She had some ideas and suggestions.

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Heidi came in this Saturday to help. She also came in yesterday Sunday to try to fix it. One of Heidi's ideas that came out of all this was to go to the main office of China Telecom and get them to update my passport number. They still had my old passport number associated with my mobile account.

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That's when Holly came over yesterday to help me go to China Telecom (that's when I temporarily lost my bank cards). It took about an hour at Chinese Telecom to get that change made. 

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But still no luck. I could not "authenticate" with the updated account. And the message would not tell us what was not matching. 

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Then Holly and I tried out another idea from Salomea. Get a brand new sim card and wechat account on an old iPhone that I have. Then just use the iPhone for my Health Code. But we needed to go to a new telephone company. We went to China Unicom to buy a sim card. After one hour (I don't think they knew what they were doing with trying to sell a sim card to a foreigner...it was a small office), they said, "Sorry, we got you registered but we can't go ahead and no one else can in any other office because you're registered." Holly and I then found a China Mobile office, the third mobile vendor in China. They said, "The system is down all over the city. Come back tomorrow morning. Maybe it will be working then."

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I had been awake since 12:30 AM and it was now past 6:00 PM, I was a bit exhausted. My smartwatch logged 15,377 steps for the day.

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Would I be able to get my Health Code handled so I could fly? It looked pretty iffy.

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Heidi meets me at the gate this morning at 8:15 AM 

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I had to get the PCR test done even though I didn't know if I would need it. But maybe they wouldn't let me in the hospital because I had no Health Code. I thought that we could probably get in if Heidi was there to explain the situation if necessary. 

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She did and everything went smoothly. We paid 40 rmb, they swabbed me, and we were back in less than an hour. 

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Right away Heidi started checking out the problem of authentication that wasn't solved the day before by updating my passport number. I was downstairs working with Holly on the process of packing up my supplements for the trip.

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Suddenly we heard Heidi scream, "I got the Health Code!" I bounded up the stairs and sure enough, there it burned a beautiful green on my mobile phone.

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What was Heidi's secret?

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When Holly and I had entered my full passport name, along with the other identifying information, to try to get the authentication to work, whether we put the family name first or last, we always capitalized all the letters because that is how it is on my passport, as in "JACKSON DWIGHT GOLDWINDE". Heidi, in her "try this, try that" way, experimented with "Jackson Dwight Goldwinde" and it worked! 

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Once I was authenticated to be me, then the Health Code worked. 

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Celebration!

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I called Salomea and told her the great results and thanked her profusely for all her help. Then Heidi, Holly, and I took some celebration photos.