Seen and heard

Some random things encountered yesterday, that I doubt I would have seen back home:

• A young child—certainly not more than 10 years old, and probably not even that old—walking around the neighborhood without any parental supervision. While not common in the US, it’s certainly quite common here; children barely bigger than their backpacks appear to walk to elementary school on their own (either individually or in gaggles) with startling regularity.
• Outside a store here, a dog was attached to a leash and sitting quite peacefully. However, what was bizarre about it was that the leash was not attached to anything; it was merely lying on the ground. It was an incredibly well-behaved dog not to react to its surroundings and all the passers-by.
• A Hungarian Mormon missionary. This I found to be incredibly amusing, although I can’t really say why. I guess I just find the concept intriguing. It’s not really a shock that there are Mormon missionaries going to Hungary (after all, I don’t think a Hungarian would spontaneously convert to Mormonism). On the other hand, what actually prompted such a conversion, and how it would lead to a Hungarian learning fairly passable English and German and tromping around the streets of Aachen to extol the virtues of the LDS is certainly worth considering. (The whole encounter was rather thought-provoking, actually; I’ll post more about it some other time.)