Things We Don't See At Home

These thoughts have been bubbling up for a while.  The title pretty much says it all...

• dogs on public transportation (You can purchase a special pass for your dog.)
•  doggie social hour at the local park.  I know you think we see this at home, but we don't.  Not like what they do here. The same dogs and their people night after night just standing/running/sniffing/laying around.  And this isn't the dog park, just the closest park to us (right at the end of our block), but this happens in every park that we walk past.

•  extremely well-behaved dogs everywhere.  Don DeGraaf swears that he saw a lady tell her dog to pee in a grate in the sidewalk, and it did.  If I ever get another dog, I'm going to ask a Hungarian to train it for me.
• signs like this one:

                                         Is it a warning... or a prediction?

• serious bike lanes
• statuary as a normal part of building decoration
• food delivery Vespas (I'd be a pizza delivery girl, if I could ride one of those...)

• Turkish/Mediterranean fast food chain (Star Kebab and others)
• little corner produce stores everywhere
• little corner floral shops and booths everywhere
• a couple stretching out in prep for running as part of a Marathon relay team, then taking a smoke break to calm their nerves
• air filter masks on bicyclists
• public displays of affection  (unfortunately they are not all this beautiful)

•  rose-shaped gelato

  As if ice cream needed something to make it better...

•  people sitting on park benches:  Some are homeless.  Most are not.  Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
• men carrying wicker market baskets
• high heels:  Heels with a suit or a dress is baby stuff.  Intermediate heel-wearing is  heels with jeans and shorts.  Advanced heel-wearing is heels with jeans pulling a wheeled suitcase while walking through a border crossing and on down the road into the next country... 
• torsos holding things up

 

• public telephone booths (also not all this attractive)

I probably could have kept adding to this post, but I decided it might never be finished and that incomplete was better than nothing at all.