You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Mayrhofen, in the Tyrolean Alps.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
It’s always enlightening to realize that the things you take for granted look different around the world.
I mean, have you ever really thought about playgrounds? Perhaps, if you have young children and they’re finger painting the ceiling after a long, wet, miserable winter.
Otherwise, playgrounds are just part of our built environment, right? We drive past one occasionally, hopefully slowing down so as not to run over any escapees. Sometimes some mumbo-jumbo about a playground shows up on a municipal ballot, and we tick a box, satisfied that we’ve expressed our rights as voters.
Playgrounds are different here in the Austrian Alps.
When we arrived in Mayrhofen (population 4000), Lee and I bought a pass for the ski lifts—there are ten, spread out around the valley. Every day, we go up to the top of a mountain, go for a hike, eat lunch, and watch the kids on the playground.
There are amazing playgrounds on the tops of these mountains. Our kids would’ve thought they had died and gone to heaven if we had brought them here. There’s all the climbing equipment you can imagine, plus trampolines, pedal-powered go-karts, a huge, ornate castle built of spruce, long amazing ball-runs, elaborate water tables, zip lines—and more that I don’t even know how to describe.
All the cafes and restaurants have play areas. Parents can have a coffee, or a long leisurely lunch, and the kids are free to play or sit at the table.
It’s all designed to create a sort of perfect spot for a family vacation, and as a result, it’s full of families. Big multi-generational groups are everywhere, hiking, biking, playing, riding the lifts, and hanging out in nature.
The kids are not on phones, they’re not screaming or crying or whining—they’re playing.
We’ve noticed epic playground situations in other wealthy countries, too. In Berlin, where something like 25 percent of the city is reserved for green space and parks, there’s a very special playground in which kids can actually build structures to play on. There’s a little kids area, where parents can hang out and keep an eye on things, but there’s also a big kids area, with more serious tools. Parents don’t go in that part. There are a couple of supervising adults who provide just enough supervision and suggestion to keep things safe. Kids learn age-appropriate skills, as well as self-sufficiency. Our minds were kind of blown when we understood what was happening in that playground. Again, our kids would’ve loved a place like that.
In Iceland, every little village and crossroads (we’re talking about populations under a thousand) has both a public pool, most with a twisty water slide, and a playground. The playgrounds are easy to spot from a distance—each one has a massive trampoline, which is like a rainbow-striped bubble on the ground. It has been a while since my kids were small, so maybe trampoline technology in the US has improved, but I’ve never seen anything like these trampolines. The only reason I didn’t try jumping on one myself was my borked ankle.
It’s interesting to see what it looks like when a society really prioritizes children and families. When our kids were small, we lived in a town that won awards for being ‘family-friendly.’ That’s why we chose to live there—if it’s winning awards, it must good, right? It was what we knew.
Turns out, there’s more than one way to build a playground—or a society.
From my writer’s notebook:
Last year, the Louvre in Paris hired a provenance expert to work full-time on researching the items in the museum’s collection that are believed to have been stolen, looted, or sold ‘under duress’ during the Holocaust. The Louvre has recently been making more of an effort to do due diligence toward restituting the paintings; a special gallery now makes about thirty of them available for public viewing. In the profile I read of this curator, she said two things that struck me:
“The backs of paintings can be very talkative.”
“No one, not my grandparents, not my parents, ever talked about the war . . . The story was transmitted through the unspoken, and there is nothing worse than the unspoken.”
Take care,
Lisa
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