Positive Thinking- Day 3

I decided to include a few pictures of the area around our village, Oberstaufenbach, for today's post. They illustrate the last couple of day's positive thoughts!
These were taken from the walking trail that Thumper and I are on every morning. We're usually trekking along from 8-9 as it has been the most reliably dry part of the day. Well, that, and by 8 we have been up for 2 hours and T has become very impatient! Unfortunately the weather wasn't quite as dry as I had hoped for this morning, and we were plodding along through a light drizzle for most of the walk. In other parts it was a real downpour, so in the pictures where it looks like there is a haze over the background, it is just the rain!


Our village traffic circle! This was my positive thought for yesterday, so I thought it deserved a picture. We have only one in our village, but there it is! From this picture to the next, it a 3km walk up the hill to the next village, Reichenbach-Steegan.

 Here we are looking back down the road! Ok, well you can't really see the trail, and the village that you can make out through the rain in this picture is actually not ours. We are down in the valley behind a few hills. I don't really understand the name of our village, because "Ober" means "over" and we are pretty much at the bottom of everything...

 I had hoped that the cows would be out today, but it was too wet for them. In the picture below, the field right in the middle is usually filled with really lovely cows. I know it sounds funny to say that cows are lovely, but the ones that graze here are! They are pretty tan and white, and have a few sweet calves among them. I have fun watching them, and Thumper has even more fun barking when they wander close to the fence. It doesn't seem to bother them in the least, they barely even look at her while she's bouncing around and doing her very best hound dog yelps!

 Here we are, entering back into our village. The homes you can see here at the edge of town are all pretty recently built, and several are actually still under construction. From what I can tell, it is primarily Americans living in them. The construction sites here are very different from the US. There aren't several crews working at the same time, with a constant flurry of actions and symphony of sounds. I rarely see more than 3 or 4 people out there, and because of that, progress is prettttty darn slow. As someone who has worked in the new home sales market in the States, I can't imagine how our buyers would have handled this construction process, but here it is the norm!

 Finally, this is one of my favorite houses to walk buy. I think the owners run some sort of dairy business, as I've seen the huge milk tanker pulling up a couple of times and hear cows mooing in the barn. I didn't want to take a picture from straight on the front because I thought I might seem like a weirdo, but both the stone barn with the ivy on it and the wooden building you can see further back are connected (the building connecting them is more recent and less picturesque so it's just as well that it's not in the photo). The red and purple flowers you see dotted along the wall are the border of the courtyard. It's just such a quaint little place, and the owners clearly love it and take good care of it. They also have 2 big dogs that come running out of the barn barking every time we walk by, but they stop very dutifully at the end of the drive way or standing on the courtyard wall and bark at us from there- NEVER leaving the property.

Ok, well that's a few snap shots of our village. On to the positive thought for today...

Pet ownership here is a duty that is taken very seriously. It seems so many people in the States think "Oh I want that puppy it's just so cute and snugly..." without really ever taking into consideration what it means to be a dog owner. It can result in some really sad situations for the animal, whether it's not properly being fed and watered, or being forced to use the bathroom in it's living quarters, left for days without attention.... There are very specific rules about all of this in Germany, and neighbors report neighbors to the authorities if they feel there is a mistreatment going on. There are no vicious breeds allowed in the country at all, and while I know people have mixed feelings about what dogs should and should not be included in that category, because of that rule there isn't much of a chance for someone to mess up a dog that could become very dangerous. Dogs also must be trained, and I'm sorry to say that as much as I love my dog, her behavior isn't within guidelines for a "well behaved dog"..... at all. Along with these strict rules comes much more freedom for pets. Dogs are welcomed into most German stores and restaurants and even on public transit, provided that they are adequately trained(again, Thumper won't be joining us at our next dinner out). At the volksmarches we have attended, there are always other dogs and food and water stations are set up anywhere there are stops for the humans. All in all, it just makes for a much more pleasant pet experience, even for people who do not particularly enjoy animals. The pets here are so well trained, most of the time you don't even know one is sitting under the table next to you until they leave! Maybe Thumper will learn some manners before we leave here, if we could just get an older dog to learn some new tricks!