Tour de Spielplätze

After my junior year of college, I visited Europe for the first time, backpacking for five weeks with Dennis and some of my other most favorite people. I returned to spend the rest of my summer work in North Bethesda, as a counselor at the Georgetown Preparatory Summer Academy, an ESL camp for extremely privileged children from all over the globe.  It was quite the plum job.

For one thing, we were fed extraordinarily well. In particular, I remember one afternoon, for lunch, among all the other piles of food, were three enormous crates of fresh sea urchins. The kids, even the Japanese students, for whom those urchins were certainly meant, all turned up their little teenaged noses at the creepy-crawly delicacy.  I regret to say that not even I ate them: I'd never had sea urchin at the time, and wasn't quite sure how to get past all those spines, or if I even wanted to.  I think of that, now, every time I see $8 Uni on a sushi menu, and I want to weep.

And we spent each weekend at camp somewhere wonderful: horseback riding, amusement parks, a bus trip to Baltimore for fresh soft shell crab.  And I had the great fun of organizing the school field day: my family, especially, will understand how much I relished that task. As a child, I organized a couple of festivals for them, and made them compete in backyard potato sack and three-legged races for medals I'd formed out of oven-dried clay.  Can you imagine what I did with a prep school budget?

And I might as well mention where a great deal of that budget was kept.  The camp's quirky leader, Rosita, kept an enormous wad of petty cash stuffed in her brassiere. Whenever a need arose, she'd rummage around in her shirt and come out with the big roll of bills: she'd peel off a couple, looking sternly at us counselors over her glasses.  She never collected receipts: she didn't need too.  With that pointed look, the message was clear: use it wisely, or else.

But she treated us well: particularly, I remember she took us counselors to a sumptuous dinner at the Inn at Little Washington at the end of the summer to thank us for our dedication. And, while the work wasn't hard, we were still given a full day off each week.  Because there were so few of us counselors, we had to stagger our days off, so each week I was left to my own devises, to explore the city on my own.

Of course, flush with confidence from having conquered Europe with a total of four t-shirts and two pairs of shorts, I marched myself right onto the Metro and took it to parts known and unknown.  I dutifully visited all of our nation's monuments, ate hot dogs and popsicles next to the various memorial and walked through all the museums of the Smithsonian.  But I also got such a kick out of picking a metro line at random and getting off at whatever spot struck my fancy, assuming that, if they bothered to take bring line to a particular point, there must be something interesting there.

I eventually realized that perhaps this wasn't the safest way to explore D.C: that occurred to me upon, emerging from a metro tunnel and squinting at a sun-baked, deserted street (Oh, the heat in DC in the summer! Why did I even bother leaving Texas?!) and the tumbledown tenements that lined it. I glanced, uncertainly, over at a policeman who was standing by the Metro exit.  He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and asked "Um, do you know what you're doing here?  I think you better just turn around, now, honey."

So, after that, I asked Rosita for recommendations before setting out. But, for a time, I did have a lot of fun exploring those metro lines.

Anyway, that's a long story to get to a short point: once again, I'm getting to explore a new city thoroughly, exclusively by rail. Since the most dangerous part of Zürich is still far safer than the best neighborhoods in D.C., once again I get to apply my formula of "ride the rail to a random destination and then figure out a way back home."

It's a really good exercise for me, especially, since I'm absolutely lousy with maps and directions, and I tend to rely much to much on Dennis and my GPS to get around. For the two recent weeks when I was without a phone, I stayed very closer to home.  But, now that I have a phone in my back pocket once again, I feel it's safe and wise to try to get this tangle of streets to resolve itself into some sort of logic and meaning.

The more I explore and understand, the more I laugh at myself: I've discovered that, because of google maps, I'm frequently going out of my way to wait for infrequent buses when, much more easily, I could have just walked for about ten minutes.  Zürich's a lot smaller than I thought, it turns out.

So, in the spirit of my peripatetic self-education, today Joey and I set out for a part of Zürich that I'd long been wanting to explore: Kreis 10, or the Wipkingen and Höngg district.  I chose a playground that looked as though it might be fun for my initial destination, and Joey and I hopped aboard a bus in search of it. Unfortunately, I didn't really have an address for the playground: I just knew that it was in the general area of a particular bus stop, and I assumed it would be easy to find.

You can guess how that went.

Looking around, I decided the most likely spot for the playground was a green, leafy area at the top of a steep, steep hill. So Joey and I trundled up, him sitting like a raj in his stroller, but of course we found no playground.  Discouraged, I got out my phone and looked for clues on the map.  And there, not too far away at all, was a green space on the map, marked with a perky little tree icon: "Friedhof Höngg."  So we eagerly went back down the hill (Joey deigning to walk for the return trip. Thanks, buddy.)...and, upon reaching the park, I learned a new vocabulary word.  Friedhof: it means cemetery.

Dennis tells me that cemeteries, here, are actually very popular places for walking, and I can see why.  This one was very pretty, and it had an incredible view of the Limmat River and Zürich down below.  I was a little confused by how little of this graveyard was taken up by graves until I remembered that the Swiss recycle their grave sites, turning them over every few decades.  I think I remember hearing that 30 years is a standard length of occupancy.  However, Dennis thinks that some families reuse the same little plot for several generations, just adding names onto the tombstones, giving the some semblance of permanency.

Pretty as it was, the Friehof didn't seem like an appropriate playground for Joey.  But my months in Zürich have taught me that a playground is never far from spitting distance, so we continued on.  We headed downhill because it was easier than up, and also because I knew that, as long as I stayed at the shore of the Limmat, I wouldn't get lost.

We met the river at a little hydroelectric power station.  "Oh, big, big water!" Joey yelled, over the noise.  To my right was a cluster of trees and a sign for Insel Höngg.  Now, that was a word I knew: an Insel is an island, and this one was lovely.  We crossed a little footbridge, and just after was a little area of the river, cordoned off for swimming.  While Joey and I watched, a brave soul stripped down and climbed in, using the current of the river as an aquatic treadmill.

Spielplatz 119

I finally convinced Joey that there might be things even more exciting than watching a man doing his morning exercise.  And, indeed, there was: eighty paces away, we found a playground.

And it was a sweet one: small, but draped with mossy shade trees, and then, out in the sun, a children's wading pool.  It was empty, as is the pool by our house, being cleaned from all the leaves and debris from yesterday's storm, I think.  And then, adjacent, there was a restaurant and a large changing area.  I'll have to return on a warmer day.

A city lifeguard, sweeping with the
broom of choice for everyone in
Switzerland: an old-fashioned, twiggy
witch's whisk.  I love seeing these!

School kids, enjoying the empty splash pool nonetheless.

Splash!

We puttered around the playground area for a little while: Joey was especially taken with the shutter stoppers on the exterior of the bathhouse. He thought it was the best joke in the world, the way they switched from "Pretty-happy-good" on one side to "Angry-bad" on the other.  Whee!

When we finally continued walking along the island, Joey amused himself with another simple pleasure: splashing heavily in every puddle in sight.  After he found the first puddle and thoroughly soaked his shoes, I decided there was no point in holding him back, anymore. And we made very good time, what with Joey racing ahead in search of newer, deeper waters to explore.

We walked all the way to the western tip of the island, and then crossed a footbridge so that we could continue on the southern shore on the Limmat, heading back toward the city.  (The path along the northern shore is the Kloster Fahr-Weg; the southern shore is the Fischer-Weg.) It was a really pretty path, pebbly, for joggers, with lots of shady trees.

We passed by a pumping station (part of the hydroelectric works) with large display about the bats that hunt over the Limmat. They'd recorded sounds of the bats chirping, which I could scarcely make out, and the city has outfitted the roof of the station as a home for the bats; as yet, I don't think they've taken up residence.  All the same, I love bumping into fun things like this.

Spielplatz 94

We recrossed the river at the dam and then walked up the Kloster-Fahr-Weg towards downtown Zürich: along the way, we found several more playgrounds, to Joey's delight.

First, this one, with an aviary and a sport field off to the side.  Oddly, the slide, pictured, was completely unaccessible to tots like Joey: to get up, you had to corkscrew around on the thick rope, or else traverse the wide rungs of the ladder that the rope formed. Joey, after staring at the slide and puzzling for a moment, stuck with the sandbox.

Spielplatz 165

Next we came across a long, thin playground, with a restaurant called the Turbinenhaus at one end, tempting me.  It looks like a perfect place to sit out and have a quiet lunch while the children play.

The little platforms, like the one Joey is on, spin around on the pole axis: I was amused to see that here, Joey adopted Ella's tic of needing to try every single piece of equipment before leaving the park.  He went for a twirl on each pole, and the swing, and the slide, and the zipline, too. Joey's much better at riding a zipline than any two-year-old should be.

Poor, unnumbered playground

Moving right along, when the Kloster-Fahr-Weg was interrupted with construction, we re-crossed the river and found an unmarked playground, lacking the official Zürich public playground number and signage.  A rogue playground.

But Joey is no snob.  He enjoyed the slide and teeter-totter, all the same.









Perhaps he might not have enjoyed it so much, though, if it had come in the shadow of the next playground, the only one to elicit an awed "Woah!" from Joey. (An exclamation I'd only heard once before, when he watched me flip his omelet in the pan. I am, indeed, impressive.)  This was the playground attached to the Gemeinschaftszentrum for Kreis 10, and it was awesome.

The lovely Spielplatz 31

What would be a wading pool.

In addition to some really pretty rope-and-wood climbing structures, things that even Ella would find challenging to scramble around, there were two sandboxes, one with a kid-powered factory-style conveyer belt and pulley, and also a wading pool, also drained for detritus cleaning.

I didn't get to look too carefully at the community center, but a drop-in art room was stuffed with busy parents and kids, and at one end was a little farm.  For two francs, apparently, your kid (aged 4+) can have the privilege of helping muck out the farm stalls during open hours.

We didn't stay long, but I promised myself that I'd return sometime this summer with all three kids: maybe we'd do the whole same walk again.  It was a couple miles in all, but I think there were enough things along the way to keep the kids excited and happy.

When we got close to downtown Zürich, I glanced at my phone to see if we had enough time to stop for dumplings for lunch: we did not!  The last time I'd checked it was only 10:50, but now, somehow, it was already 11:40, and I had only twenty minutes to get home before Alex and Ella.  Yip!

But, wonder of wonders, I knew exactly where I was, five minutes from a bus line that would take me almost to my doorstep. I knew I could shave a minute or two off that time: I started running, to Joey's great delight ("Wheee!), hopped on a bus just as it pulled up...and beat Alex home by five minutes.  So yes, slowly but surely, I'm starting to figure my way around. Thank goodness!

After four hours of tromping around this afternoon, I and the kids took it easy for the rest of the day: the kids played outside and inside and eased into summer.  And we ended the day with a chat with some much-loved family.

Ella, playing horsies with her cousin.