My Dog Kala

No, I don't have a dog. However, I notice that more and more people do. It seems as though long gone are the days of outrageously pirced Gou Hu Kou's (or dog registrations). Only a few years ago, people were keeping their dogs unregistered. Therefore forced to walk their dogs only at night and not without great fear. It used to be that dog walkers would stand out in the wee hours, socializing all the while, and at the first sign of blue and red flashing lights, would snap up their pooch and run as if it were a five pound bag of cocaine. Though, today, as I walk around Beijing, it seems those years are a file for the past. Little dogs, big dogs, run about with their owners in broad daylight--labs, retrievers, huskies, poodles, you name it. Yesterday, I watched a man with two dogs, one lab and one tiny yapper dog playing fetch. Traditional sticks and tennis balls? To heck with them! He threw empty plastic bottles this way and that, time after time and bottle after bottle. The dogs playing and wrestling, and having more fun than a canine should be allowed to have.

Next pithy thought: slapping...

Something Fresh

Often in Beijing, one requires something new and fresh to keep a certain balance in sanity. Not to say, that I would come home crazy, but to be social, I joined some fellow expatriates to see a Saturday Matinee at the theater. Being males, we went to see The Expendables, and thoroughly enjoyed it for its simple appeal to our id. However, that was not the something fresh I found that day. Along with our movie tickets we were given a free gift... a tube of toothpaste. Tiger Toothpaste, Tiger Fresh! Always looking for something fresh.

Breakfast of Champions

"Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

This morning, I haunted my newly found and newly favorite dumpling shack for breakfast. Dumplings, I thought, surely are the breakfast of champions. However, I was wrong. As I sat down on a short stool in a one room fits all (including the stove, work counter, cahier, A/C, TV [all in the confines of half of the room you are currently sitting in]), I noticed what the gentleman across the table was eating for breakfast. Dumplings... and beer. Yes, at 8 in the morning, he pounded back a 22oz bottle of beer in 10 minutes and went off to work, shouting on his cell phone all the while.

Beer: Breakfast of Champions. And so on.

Welcome to sit at IKEA Restaurant

Over the course of a week, we have collected enough adventures in our minds, I'm sure, to fill a short novella. All of which were most amusing to us, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. This adventure regards our trip to that blue and yellow store we all know and only mildly love.

We made our way across town to take care of a stash of paperwork with the intent of perusing through IKEA afterwards to find some small furnishings for our newly rented apartment (story to follow). However, we arrived a full hour and a half too early. The doors to the lobby area were open and low and behold, we were not the only ones milling about in high hopes of early shopping.

Sauntered about, drank some free juice, got stared at, perused the catalog and sat bored until 9 am, when the announcement was made. "Welcome to come sit at IKEA restaurant and enjoy breakfast while you wait for the store to open" (please enjoy my accurate Chinglish translation). The rush was on, like cattle up an escalator. But for what you ask? IKEA breakfast? YES! Serving a Chinese breakfast of dumplings, soup, fried doughnuts, rice porridge--a set breakfast all for the low price of 4 kuai (0.59 dollars). I will say it now and say this many times... that is cheap, and the Chinese people know it.

So I say, "Moo." Line me up in the cattle car.

But IKEA is so much more than just breakfast, it is for people watching. Watching the Locals take naps in the beds, under the sheets and blankets. Eying them as they open up their picnic baskets on the dining tables. These are truly living dioramas. To this we say, "Why not?"

But we only go for the fitted sheets (found nowhere else in the whole of China).