All Dogs go to heaven

At least if your belief system leans towards one of the ones where when you die, you either go up and max out on fluffy clouds or down and burn in incidiary pits, eventually you might question whether animals are party to the agreement for the dispensation of souls towards the "up" escalator or the "down."

One of the first questions i was posed upon being picked up by the Chan Wu gang, was
"Do you like dogs?" Of course, Man's Best Friend and all that. Chan Wu has four. Two of the fluffy white variety, and two of the big barky variety. The big ones are harnessed to their brick houses by chains, and their time consists of finding things to bark at, eating, and pooping.


At first glance your compassion meter starts going off, thinking, "poor poochies, all tied up."
Then you listen to the barking for a while and start contemplating putting some of these well honed sword swanging techniques to use in choppin' heads.

At Master Wang's house, they had a baby pooch that was always running around, inside the house and out. Being a little pooch, it was always jumping up and down and snapping at folks, particularly students who liked to play with dogs. Enter Leo, German, 16.

He got bit by this here little poochie, not too bad but it drew blood. Which was really no problem, until the little pooch keeled over from rabies the next week. And the neighbors dog. And the neighbor's neighbors dog. Rightly fearing fatal viral infections, he made quick tracks with his father back to his native Germany.

Our other foreign student, slightly more prone to worrying about diseases and malaises than the next guy (he doensnt have the DSM-IV next to the bed or nothing, but still) got to thinking about his own contact with that little pooch, and decided that he too, needed to get home, cause he shure wasnt getting shots in China, good gracious no.

That leaves yours truly as the sole foreign student at Chan Wu Academy, at least for the next three weeks before i start making moves towards the western world where, through the process of domestic vaccination, we have mostly eradicated such viral problems.

Anyways, China ain't no joke.

But i do get almost exclusive access to Shaolin Master Xi Peng Wang, where he'll teach me how to break out of the handcuffs at quarantine.