Susie's Leaning Tower of Chocolate for 2002 January 22

There are lots of street dogs here and most of them are really cute. They're little and they don't make a lot of noise usually. There are some that live in our parking lot, and every chiosc in Tatarasi has a dog sleeping under it. I thought maybe all dogs in Romania were little, except for the ones that are pets that are the dogs you see in books and didn't think really existed in real life.

But they're not. On one side of the church there is a pretty big poufy dog (who also doesn't make much noise) and on the other side, in a huge cage like they have at the zoo, is this humongous thing I was ready to believe was some sort of Romanian lion. Sora Daniella insisted it was a dog though. It's seriously the size of a medium lion! The elders say the proprietor (of our church building) lets it out at night to be a watch dog. Hopefully that doesn't mean during the baptism tonight.

We've discovered another problem with letting the snow pack into ice. Today and yesterday it has been "warm" out (like a super duper extra cold day in Bakersfield, warm). So the ice is melting. So it's really slippery and there are big treacherous puddles everywhere. One of the Section 2 workers was clearing the ice away from the front gate when we left. There really was like a foot of ice there.