We made our official move to Huainan yesterday. It should have entailed a 2 hour train ride and a 1 hour car ride from the train station to our apartment. But that is not how it went.... Adam said the HR lady at his plant called the train station to make sure it was ok to take a dog on the train. They said it's ok as long as the dog is in a carrier and it stays up by us in our seats. Since Smudgie's crate is too big to be up by our seats, we planned on putting him in Adam's backpack with his head sticking out. Not the most comfortable thing, but it was only going to be for 2 hours. When we got to the train station with Smudgie already in the backpack, the x-ray and metal detector people let us through, but we were immediately ushered to the Train Station Master. After much shaking of heads and Chinese jibber jabber, they told us no dogs allowed on the train. So I said "But, my husband here, he saw a guy taking chickens on the train before." which is true. In a plastic bag, no less! And the guy said, "Yes, 5 chickens in a bag, 5 small chickens. That is ok." But not a small dog... agh!
We called Cynthia, who works for Guilford Shanghai and she saved us, by getting us a ride to the bus station. But Smudgie, who won't pee outside unless it's on grass, didn't get a chance to potty again because there was absolutely no grass available at Guilford Shanghai or the bus station. And with the bus being a 6 hour ride, we were worried about him. Dogs are supposed to be allowed on the bus but to be safe, we decided to put him in a cardboard box to get him through security. But after walking from where the taxi dropped us off, through security, and to the place where we boarded the bus, we saw two other dogs so we opened the box to discover that Smudgie had peed and thrown up inside of it. Poor little guy. Adam cleaned him up in the bathroom while I put together his crate so he could ride under the bus with the luggage.
Side story about the bus station! I had to use the bathroom and I knew it was going to be a squat toilet. What I didn't know, is that there weren't going to be any stall doors. I had heard about these, but only imagined them existing way out in the country. I was wrong. Your nice squat toilets, if you can even call them that, have individual "holes" with foot traction on either side and the stall doors go all the way to the floor for privacy. In this bathroom, there were two rows of stalls with a single trough running through all of them on either side. You straddle the trough, go, and everyone's waste gets flushed down the trough to a single hole at the end. I guess they figure there's no need for privacy because in this configuration, if someone were to see you, all they'd see is the profile of your bare *ss. It took me seeing someone else's "profile" to decide that it wasn't that big of a deal. Before a 6 hour bus ride, you gotta empty. So I bit the bullet and used a stall at the end of the row in hopes that no one would venture down that far. I should also mention another lovely thing about squat toilets. You can't flush toilet paper down them. So there's a nice little bucket in every stall for you to put your used tissue. Just another thing you gotta get used to.
Another side story! While waiting for the bus, I saw a baby about my niece's age, wearing what I can only describe as crotchless pants. I thought to myself, that sounds like the worst idea in the world! What if you're holding your baby and it needs to poop? Here's the best picture I could get, incognito:
And here's the link to a blog I found if anyone wants to know more about these wonder-pants. http://arielleinchina.blogspot.com/2011/01/crotchless-pants-all-chinese-babies-are.html
Anyways, I spent the first 4 hours of the bus ride worrying about how Smudgie was doing under the bus and then we stopped for a break. We got to take him out and what a good little boy, he didn't pee or poop at all. So we let him have a potty break and then we were on our way again. The bus arrives in Hefei, which is about 2 hours from Huainan. So a company driver took us the rest of the way home and we arrived around midnight. What a day. It's good to be home. And Smudgie is so great, he's acting like nothing traumatizing happened. Here's a pic of him with Crotchless Pants Baby:
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