You are currently browsing the daily archive for January 16th, 2008.
Genevieve: Occasionally, Kenji and will take the train to a park nearby Walter’s work and meet him for lunch. It’s gotten cold now, so we haven’t gone in a while, but the last time we did Kenji and I witnessed the most peculiar game. There was a group of Japanese school kids there from the adjacent public school, and after playing some rather vicious looking dodgeball, they moved on to a game which basically entailed the teachers running around after them with a huge thick paper paddle. The object of the game? To hit the kids with paddle. This of course caused a great deal of panic and excitement, but all in all most seemed to enjoy it. Hmmm…
The playgrounds here are filled with monkey bars and rickety see-saws, items that we enjoyed in our own youth, but have long since been removed from American playgrounds as they were deemed too dangerous. I brought this up in an earlier post (the poor condition of most playgrounds here), and my mom commented on how she had seen a documentary about a group of moms in Tokyo trying to get a new playground and the bureaucracy that they came up against. That’s one thing we’re definitely looking forward to upon returning home on the 31st–playgrounds! Arlington has so many wonderful playgrounds and all of them are practically new. We’re very lucky, although I guess that’s where those high taxes are going.
