Beijing is....chic, historical, and SO not dog friendly!

When we first arrived in China, after weeks of running around preparing the necessary documents for Mufasa to make to trek with us, we were denied in-home quarantine. Thirty days at a luxury Chinese dog-sitter........I totally bawled at the airport. No, not the graceful tear sliding down your cheek cry, the heaving sobs, people look away cause your such a freak sobs, I mean common....it's a dog. That's what the Chinese don't understand, to us he's part of our family. So here were, at the below pictured facility, thirty days later to pick him up.




It was a total fiasco! At the airport, we didn't have a passports because the Chinese officials needed them to apply our resident permits. No one spoke English and no one knew where we were supposed to go. After walking the entire length of the Beijing airport no less than 6 times we found a nice woman who spoke a little English and helped us through the rest of the airport process. All we had was a piece of paper with a map in Chinese providing directions from the airport to Moof. You can never trust taxis, they drive in circles to charge you more and you never even know if they understand your final destination to begin with. But...we got there....overcharged or not. And we picked up "Moo our poo" as he is affectionately referred to in our house.

They led us to Mufasa and as they said good-bye informed us that we could not travel by bus, subway, or train with the dog so we would need to take a taxi....

Umm.......excuse me?!?! We live Jinan, yea....five hours away, I'm NOT taking a taxi!@#
So ensued the fiasco, dodging security as we snuck Mufasa back to our hotel, keeping in mind the two bus transfers and three subway transfers we took to avoid taking a taxi. We.are.so.cheap....I know. This took much longer than expected, plus Moof was a mess and needed grooming, which in and of itself was a nightmare. But I'm really focusing on all bad things and not filling you in on how cool Beijing really is, despite being over-run with tourists. We did get a chance to see two of the major tourist attractions that Beijing has to offer. Tienanmen square and the Olympic venues. Here are a few pictures of us.

We arrived to Beijing in style on the fastest train in China!

The birds nest is as cool in real life as it was on the news.

Soldiers falling out of line to check out our babe of a dog at Tienanmen Square.

Mike totally got the short end of stick. We had already purchased our return tickets on the D-train (the luxury fast train) only to find out that Mufasa was not allowed. So we agreed that there was no need for both of us to lose our seats and we split up. It was hell as he took a taxi to no-where, traveled to all four of Beijings train terminals trying to find the 'pet-friendly' terminal, hitching a ride in rush-hour traffic, and having to stand on the third class train with a crying dog. Love you VERY much!