It's been almost two months since the execution of social distance due to COVID-19. Travelling is not allowed. The restaurant is not open. Library and university are also closed. That means everyone has to stay at home for most activities. Only necessary grocery is allowed. I have been living in Hasselt, Belgium for two months. Most of the time I stay at home, cooking, doing yoga and working on my thesis.
People still could go out as long as keeping 1.5m distance from each other. When I am outside, I usually go for a short street walk or jogging. However, it’s blossom season recently. Flowers are blooming. All the sudden, I started to sneeze and got hay fever. That is definitely not beautiful at all with those pretty and prosper flowers. Even though those flowers make me sneeze, I am still astonished by their beauty. Every week I have some short walks and I find that the scenery of the street changes because the flowers fall and bloom.
Apart from those attractive flowers, I have much time to cook, try new dessert recipes and do yoga. Cooking and yoga become the only two causal and non-sedentary activities in my routine. I could have the mood to enjoy food, slow myself down and relieve anxiety. Trying new recipes is kind of an achievement if it successes. I have tried white wood sweets, red bean sweets, cinnamon buns and oat cookies. Whitewood sweets are pretty successful. It is easy to cook. I only need to put all ingredients in the rice cooker. After it is well cooked, add sugar and enjoy it. Apart from cooking, I have more time to do yoga, but I do not spend more time doing yoga by following yoga videos. However, I found myself more relieved when I did not rush to follow those yoga videos, which is an improvement for overall yoga progression.
Last, my obligation working on my thesis in this quarantine time is going on. My thesis is about conceptualisation health in YouTube diet videos. I watched YouTube diet videos and transcribed them. Then, I did the quantitative data collection and analysis. I analysed those numerical data in Excel. Excel was pretty enough for this simple analysis. However, I still spent much time figuring out the meaning of correlation and the significance of two variables. Thanks to the fruitful information online, I could learn step by step to tackle those challenges. In addition to quantitative analysis, I focused more on qualitative analysis to find out those video producers’ opinion on health in the aspect of the diet. I had been reading so much literature and finished the report. However, I am stuck in the discussion chapter now and facing the difficulty to write a strong argument in the discussion chapter. Therefore, I realise that it might be a good idea to find the inspirations and start my blog as a record of my journey in Europe.
