Wednesday, May 9, 2007

4 April: Some Dog Owners are Mean

Evelyne was back today and the three of us all walked down to the Apotheke together. Evelyne kept slipping into German and Ara would give her funny looks and remind her that I might not be able to understand everything she was saying. It was very cute.

On our way back we ran into a man who was walking his dog (some sort of nondescript mutt) off the leash. Cody and Eiko went up and greeted the new dog and everyone seemed to be getting along just fine, until Eiko snapped a bit (he is very sensitive because he was bitten by a neighbor’s dog as a puppy). Cody just wanted to play, and when the new dog took off running, Cody went chasing after him at full speed. The other dog started running towards the street and I got a little freaked out, so I yelled at Cody a couple times and he eventually stopped in his tracks but didn’t come back to me. At this point the main started screaming at me to keep my dog on the leash if I couldn’t control him. I really wanted to say, “um….your dog is the one that ran away!” but my German failed me completely – I was speechless. The man didn’t even try to retrieve his dog – he just started walking in the direction I had run. When he got to Cody he started yelling at Cody in German. At that point I really wanted to shout, “Hey, my dog doesn’t speak German!” but I couldn’t even get that out. Evelyne was furious. She said she’s encountered this dog before and he always has his dog off the leash but tells everyone else to keep their dog on the leash, even though his dog is just as out of control (or in this case more so) than the other dogs! This is by far the worst encounter I’ve had with another dog owner here – I’m just glad Evelyne was there so I wasn’t alone.

Evelyne invited me over for coffee after our walk but I had to go to an IWC meeting. Today’s speaker was the woman from the Frauenhaus (women’s shelter) that the IWC supports. I heard her speak last year so I mostly went today for the social visit. I took the U-Bahn and discovered that if I take the U-4 down to Schwabstraße, it’s only about a ten-minute walk to Café Merlin. Now why didn’t I try this earlier? The group was rather small today, as a lot of people are on vacation for the Easter holiday, but we had a good discussion.

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