I and Sabine took a walk to the city, to visit an exhibition in the water tower, where also should be a great view on the city. Last days temperature has been something around zero, but today it was a bit warmer, a nice weather for walking and on the way we noticed, how many houses have towers on their corners, and balconies, and patterns in their stony fascade. And the exhibition at the water tower was gone! Last time we wanted to film the water tower for my documentary (I make a documentary and Sabine is following me to make a documentary about me making a documentary) it was already too late and exhibition at water tower is opened only until 4 o'clock. At least the paper on the door told that. Today we arrived there around 3, but there was no paper on the door anymore, the door upstairs was still closed and on the first floor in the building there is a bar, didn't also seem to be much connected to exhibition. Maybe it's not the touristic season, maybe it was the black cat we saw on the way, who knows. Dissapointing.
Not to stay with empty hands on that day we decided to visit two churches on our way – the first one was the Orthodox Cathedral on Piata Catedrala, the other one was Roman Catholic church, the one that's on the other side of the tram stop near Millennium Center. Catholic church was very silent, one woman praying in the corner. The other one, big, one, was big. I've passed this church more than twenty times, but it doesn't invite to step in. We went in anyway, and it seemed pretty touristic – some statues protected with metal bars and also most of church area was closed. Yes, you can see, how it looks inside, but you don't get any feeling from there and just go out and feel much better on the streets, because streets are not that empty. Anyway, Sabine took a tram home, and I took a direction to the riverside, also to walk home.
On the riverside, near the canal lock's, historical buildings of city center are replaced with house blocks. I wrote an article to EVS Express web about historical buildings of Arad, where I included a part with block buildings, and I thought maybe to use it also in my documentary. But when I filmed other buildings, then by time I arriver back to Micalaca it was too dark already and in the nighttime video quality is really crappy, so block building video clips were still missing. I was taking some pictures, when suddenly one older man with a small dog stopped next to me and started yelling at me. I removed my headphones from ears and told I don't understand, because at first I thought maybe he wanted to asked something and then it's not very polite to ignore people; but he kept yelling at me in Romanian, wanted to grab my photo camera and shouted something about me being a spy. Many nice people around.
I continued my way then (and of course kept taking pictures of blocks I passed); when I noticed one dog is following me. He (or she, I don't know) was young and friendly and not scared of me like most street dogs. I scratched him behind the ears, he still didn't want to bite me, instead of it kept following me and sometimes running somewhere further between the road and river, or stopping near some houses, but then coming back to me. Usually street dogs in Romania are really small and ugly, but he was nice. Thin, but good-looking, probably mix of a German shepherd blood and someone unknown. He was walking with me until Billa and I wanted him to stay riverside, not to jump into traffic, but he followed me across the roads to the small kiosks we have near our house and stayed there, because there was food. I hurried home, because I didn't want to close the door in front of his nose (animals are not allowed in volunteers' apartments), but Arad is not that big city and usually you can see same dogs on streets over and over again, so probably I'll meet this dog some other time, when he is wandering on streets and when I am wandering on streets.
