Walking the dog

I have been spending christmas and new year with my fiancee's family in Pleven, Bulgaria, and to some extent become part of this family. As such I needed a task in order to feel needed and beloved. My task: to walk the dog. (The dog is a food loving cocker named Beki)

Regularly taking walks in the socialist architectured housing area that like so many other in Bulgaria is called Drujba (friendship) has provided me with plenty of details that highlight the differences between Sweden and Bulgaria. The Darkness at the Edge of Town, the other dogs and the other people.

The darkness is a very striking feature if you go out after sunset. Not that it is completely dark, but the street lights are positioned further away from each other, somehow. It all gives a vey spooky impression the first night, but after a while you feel at home in it. After all, a human being feels better when it is dark at night, than in fabricated light. And what can be cozier than the lights coming from windows when the outside is almost black?

The dogs are always an issue for a foreigner in Bulgaria, but when you are walking a dog (that is not even yours), you are carefulle watching out for what other dogs are around you.

These can be divided into three groups. There are of course some who are owned by individuals, who usually are with them. This kind of dogs are plenty in Sweden and pose no problem. Unless you are in the mountain where the shepherds dogs are half wild, big as bears, and often very far from their owners. But that is another story.

The second kind of dogs is a kind that I really miss back home. It is dogs who are taken care of collectively by a group of people. It could be the inhabitants in a block, or the people who work in an office building - those who see the dog every day, who feed it, caress it and talk to it. No one takes the dog home, and it sleeps where it pleases. These dogs of course do not get violent, since they have everything they want and people take care of them.

I think this arrangement does so much for a collective of people, and I think that these dogs live as well as any dog, so why couldn't it be like this everywhere? Still I have only seen it happen in Bulgaria (I guess it happens in other countries outside the western world, as well).

The third group of dogs are those who live completely wild. Since Drujba is located where Pleven ends, right next to it begins a small forest that probably is perfect for wild dogs. From there they can make detours into the housing area looking for food (read: garbage), and then go back to sleep unthreatened at night. Human beings tend to avoid them. For all I know they live well when they live, but you often see them with broken legs and similar signs of a dangerous life style.

Stray dogs, picture from Wikipedia

My heart always starts beating faster when I see these wild dogs. They have not been violent with me and Becki, but since they are probably quite suspicious of humans, I try to avoid them. I have no idea how they and Becki would interact, and I did get bitten once. That is also another story, a really great one, actually.

The other people could not be easily divided into cathegories. They are rather a large collection of indiviuals. In Amos Oz's novel A Tale of Love and Darkness someone says about Jerusalem's population that 10% are very rich, 10% very poor and 80% very odd. That would be a very good explanation of street life in a Bulgarian city as well. And ther are lots of people. If you walk a dog in a housing area in Sweden you will not meet many people, and those you meet are unlikely to talk to you.

I remember saying hello to a dog in Sweden, whereupon its owner looked suspiciously at me and asked: "Do you know her?" Here you don't need to know a dog in order to talk to it, or to its owner. When I walk Beki, I hear all kinds of hellos and compliments of the dog.

The most shocking for me was the day before christmas when some middle aged guys sipping rakija asked me if it wasn't about time to slaughter it for christmas. What would you answer to that?

Not much, I just walk the dog home, shocked and slightly amused. Once I got home and sat down with a cup of coffee I looked out at the identical rows of houses and thought that the houses might be dull but their inhabitants not.