e have booked a dog-friendly Airbnb, got our sights on a few wide-open spaces for Bailey to run around in and have some good take-out prospects (since Bailey is still not very restaurant friendly, aka, calm) for Berlin. Hoping for days of roaming neighborhoods to get a feel for them, the arctic weather may push us to mostly hole up and see what Berlin winter living is really like - indoors 24/7.While we have our sights on a few eating opportunities (burgers and burritos mostly, because we haven't been back to the US for nearly two years) and hopefully a meetup or two with fellow expats/Berliners who have been so kind via the lifelines of social networks, the big thing this trip will be to see how Bailey might fit in there. After four years of ruling her suburban backyard, city living has been quite an adjustment for her.
German dogs set the bar pretty high, often walking alongside their owners without a leash yet never deviating for every new smell and enjoying a dinner out with their people, quietly snoozing under the table so that you wouldn't even know they were there. Bailey is a whole different beast. Every new smell is a reason to jerk her lead to the point of shoulder dislocation and the last time we tried to take her out to dinner, she knocked the table - and a bottle of wine - over on me. We often have to take a deep breath and remind ourselves: she's just a dog. And she did grow up in low-key California, after all.
Her boundless energy and excitement for life means that wherever we choose to go, she needs reasonable places to run around and explore. She reminds me a lot of the dog in this music video, complete with the perky, flopping ears, taking in everything around her with the exuberance of a small child. While there will be no sunny beaches or oceans to splash in like there are for lucky dog Lemon, we hope Bailey will be as impressed as we were with the amount of parks and green spaces there were in a city as metropolitan as Berlin. Lots of snowballs to chase should only sweeten the deal for her.
And so, on the road we go!
Johnny Neon 'Hearts' from Dave Meinert on Vimeo, via Good
Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische
