Today was the big day! The end of quarantine, or so we hoped. We were up and about quite early and set off for Kyrenia at about 830, to be sure to be at the hospital for 9am. We had chosen the local state hospital, Dr Akcicek Hospital, which is near the government offices and the law courts. We parked up next door in the Land Office carpark and went into the front of the hospital. There was a young chap in a reception office who spoke reasonable English and he asked us to wait, and then took various details from us and entered them into his computer: name, passport details (good that we took them), telephone numbers. Then he told us to go outside, turn right and go into another door. Went in there and found a doctor’s office. Nice young chap who did the PCR test. Never a pleasant experience but thankfully soon over. He also registered us, this time in a handwritten log and he printed out some labels which went on the PCR swabs and we got the duplicated ticket. He also gave us a barcode which we scanned to go into the app as our hospital record.

We were home again by 930 and then began the wait for results. There is a PCR test lookup on the hospital website. Well…. as the day wore on it became excruciating. THe PCR lookup system is crap. You key in your barcode number, press enter, it spins a bit and then comes back…. no message… nothing. Honestly who writes code like this? What does it take to put in “your results are not yet ready” or “Barcode unrecognised” or some useful response????. As it is , the system might be non functioning and our request lost in the ether. We rang the hospital 4 or 5 times but no one answered and after about 10 expensive minutes each time, it cut us off. We rang the quarantine people but they were no help. We nearly drove back to the hospital at about 5pm to physically check even though this would break our quarantine conditions. In the end we have decided to wait till tomorrow morning and then go. More defensible if it came to that we thought

So fed up as you can probably tell…. .