puppies can be surprisingly not cute

Today is National Day in China. The PRC was founded on October 1st in 1949, so every year the Chinese people get a whole week off (at least us teachers do) to celebrate the glory that is Communism.

Celebrations for me usually include eating cake and spending money. Cake is hard to find here (good cake, at least), so I just settled for spending money and went shopping in the fabric district. I bought a few scarves and ordered some custom-tailored clothes and then headed over to Ikea to look around and relax.

Well, turns out it's impossible to relax when everyone else in Shanghai also decides to go to Ikea at the same time. I'm not sure if it was the feeling of being crammed in a relatively small space with a ton of people or something I ate earlier in the day, but my stomach started killing me so I made a bee-line for the metro to head back to my apartment.

As I was hurrying across the street, trying to navigate the sea of bikes, cars, and people, an old Chinese man threw a box right in front of me. The top popped off from the force of the fall and revealed two dozen small puppies crawling on top of each other.

Normally, there isn't anything I'd rather have thrown in front of me than a little puppy. In this case, though, the sight was absolutely horrifying. Even assuming that the old man was selling them as pets, it was so sad to see a bunch of puppies stuffed together in a tiny box. Who knows how long they had been like that or were going to have to stay in the box together.

I guess I shouldn't expect much in terms of animal rights from a country that doesn't even believe in human rights.