All Dogs Go to Heaven

The Argentines love animals.

Most of my friends host parents have dogs and a cat or two in the tiny apartments and houses that the families occupy. As mentioned before, my family has Aldo and two cats. Aldo runs the house; he keeps busy barking at the broom and hasseling the cat.

Cordoba is the main street in Rosario. On the weekends it´s full of people busy running errands they can´t during the week and street performers line up and sing, dance and sell awesome candied nuts. For those who´ve been to Barcelona, it´s little a mini Las Ramblas. If you walk all the way down Cordoba, you get to El Rio Panara, the 9th largest river in the world. El Monumento Nacional de la Bandera is there too, a huge statue dedicated to the designer of the Argentine Flag and a graveyard for some of Argentina´s fallen soldiers. Or at least I think so, I wasn´t quite paying as much attention as I should have during the tour.

I walk down Cordoba every day to go to school. My first day I walked down and was alarmed when every ten feet there were dogs laying flat and immobile in the middle of the road. No cars can drive on Cordoba, and people were just walking around and stepping over these dogs as if nothing was wrong.
¨Oh my god, are these dogs dead?¨I worried in my jet legged induced delirium. ¨Why isn´t anyone taking care of them? Shouldn´t someone move their bodies or something?¨There are all raizes (breeds) of them too, poodles and labs and german shepherds and mutts all laying (lying? I don´t know I can´t speak any language anymore) as if some doggie atomic bomb had went off and there were no survivors.

I soon figured out that obviously there were not hundreds of dead dogs in the streets of Rosario. They are street dogs, sleeping. They are incredibly common in Rosario, but unlike any other place I´ve ever been, the people treat them with respect. Most don´t have homes, but some street dogs have collars which means that someone somewhere in the city feeds them. If a street dog follows you for a few blocks the Rosarenos (Rosario peeps) call them your Guardian Angel.

Which is how we met Angel. Our first night out on the town in Rosario, a group of 8 of us from the program were hopelessly lost. We were attempting to find a Boliche (Dance club. My blog is like a mini lesson in Castellano!Whoooo!) This mangy little black lab with one white foot followed us for about twenty blocks. ¨How sweet!¨ You think. ¨Lizzie is protected by her own little angel!¨ Well, our Angel apparently had a death wish. Every 5 seconds when a car would zoom by, Angel would jump out in front of the car and bark at the tires and every time I would scream bloody murder because I thought he was going to get run over. It happened over and over until Devin placed herself between Angel and I and tried to get me to shut up. We were trying to make friends and I was scaring them off.

The next day on our tour of Rosario we met up with Angel again. He walked with our group of 50 students and every moment or so would challenge death and the Argentine taxi drivers.


I see him everyday. And everyday is the same. He jumps and barks, and I scream so loud that my face turns crimson and the Argentines look at me like I´ve just held up a Brazilian flag

He´s the best crazed, suicidal, four legged angel a girl could ask for.