Look at my dead dog and other stuff from our travels.

Sandy, Bella and I are traveling to Bejing this week to start a new job.  It should be great.

Our trip began in Baltimore where a lady befriended me because she thought Bella was so cute. Nice. She said her friend had a similar dog (it was a Maltese too) named Bella.  What a coincidence.  She decided to show me pictures of the dog the last one was a picture of the lifeless dog captioned, "Bella 2008-2018".  I asked if the dog was dead, and she said, "yes"Weird. I thanked the lady for showing me the dead dog and we were on our way to Seoul.

You may be wondering why we were heading to Seoul.  To understand the itinerary, you have to understand the Chinese pet inspection system. Each city sets their own policy.  We are heading to Beijing which has a one month quarantine. There is no way I can put our baby in quarantine for a month, so we found that Guangzhou is the only city that has no quarantine.  We decided to fly there. but there is only one flight a day that allows pets to fly in the cabin, I am a crazed pet owned and do not want her underneath.  Hence, we had to fly to Seoul wait 16 hours (!), to take the only flight to Guangzhou with pets in the cabin, spend the night, then fly to Beijing. 

The strange thing is, it turned out really well.  We flew for 13 hours and got to Seoul where we snuck Bella in the transit hotel which had a perfectly acceptable king sized bed.  We slept 9 hours. We got to Guanghou (city motto, "Trust nobody because we are all out to make money ethically or not") where we had time for some tourist activities (which made it a legitimate stop and not just a ruse to get around the pet inspection system). The hotel had the most interesting safety system...a mask/head gear for fresh air in fires.  It made no sense to me, but I liked the picture of the guy wearing the suit.

We got to Bejing and were surprisingly rested and mostly over our jet lag.

The Barcelona Flying Thief

Barcelona was our last stop on our fabulous trip to Portugal and Spain last summer.  It was fabulous except the taxis were on strike (something about Uber being permitted) so on our way out we had to lug our luggage, along with our baby Bella for 15 minutes to the subway.  The subway A/C was out so it was hot as hell there. We get to the ticket machine and a guy tries to scam us there.  We get to the platform and we have to wait 10 minutes in the incredible heat.  I am sweating and a bit irritated. 

The subway finally comes and I put my first bag on when I feel something in my pocket.  Some guy is trying to steal my wallet! Now I am pissed.  I grab his hand and start yelling for the police. Sandy is yelling at him too.  Next thing you know he rips his hand away and starts to run away.  I decide it is time to chase him (I am not so impressed with the wisdom here).  I catch up to him at the stairs (in case you were wondering, I was impressed with myself that I caught him) and I decided to shove him as hard as I could down a long set of stairs. He went flying. I realized at that point I was going down the stairs too and I think I looked like a cartoon character hitting the breaks trying to stop myself from going down too.  I grabbed the rail and stopped myself...lucky.

Standing at the top of the stairs, I hear Sandy yell, "Steve, the bag!" I run back to the subway just as the doors closed.  I pounded on the door as I watched my bag begin its Barcelona journey on its own. Crap.  Next thing you know, a police officer came (he would have come in handy a couple of minutes earlier) and told me the bag was gone. We dejectedly made our way to the police box trying remember what was in the bag that was not to be returned until the officer gets word that a good Samaritan has returned our bag. The officer says it never happens. 

This seems to be our life.  A lot of stuff happens uniquely to us...almost always good.