Die Spielplätze

The playgrounds.

Spiel = play, game Platz = place

We have been super impressed with the playgrounds and parks around here. It's not that I don't love the brightly colored plastic playgrounds we had at home--I do. For sure. But these parks we've come across so far are just all so different. They're more "natural" seeming with wood and rope. And they're just different. Different types of play and exploration than we're used to. Less "could they hurt themselves on this?" Not that they seem unsafe here, mind you . . . I'll just show you what I mean.

This park here is the one that is, like, a 2 minute walk from our flat:



See the "Spielplatz" sign?

Another interesting sign (to me) with how dog-friendly I've heard Berlin is, is this sign: Hundeverbot. Hund = dog and verboten = forbidden, prohibited, banned.



The park right near us also has, like, 3 separate playground areas. I don't know why that is, exactly, but we've noticed it at pretty much all the other parks as well. Like, there's one little area in a fence and then you can walk a little path and there's another fenced in area or areaS.

But this is all the little park right near us:









A cooking theme, perhaps?




(That is a new friend we made the other night who is also new to the area and speaks English and French and I'm glad the picture is blurry so you can't identify her so well.)

We go to that one a lot, of course, since it's right by us.

On the 4th of July, the kids and I walked a very very long way to a special grocery store called "Veganz" because it's one of the very few places I heard I can buy canned black beans. With the long walk, I told the kids we could also check out a new park over there. So we did:





See that climbing wall thing off to the right?





Fun spinny things:



A fun pulley set-up for sand, I guess:



The second Spielplatz at this park had some super cool stuff. Check this out:



Perhaps it's just us, but we've never seen anything like that at a park before. Pretty cool!





Autumn spun around on this yellow thing and pretended it was Rapunzel's hair and kept shouting (like Rapunzel) "Best day everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!"



Next time we'll take the train to that park! ;)

You may have seen our recent "Mexican food" failure on my Facebook. Well, on the way there, we passed a park. We were starving so we went to the restaurant first and after the kids' non-dinners (they ate just tortillas) we stopped by that park to make things more positive again. The kids decided it was Big Top / Circus themed. Yeah, maybe a travelling circus, perhaps, with this covered wagon / train car:



The two playground areas weren't as widely spaced at this park:







Oooh, a trapeze!





Dalton figured out a nifty way to help balance himself on the tight rope:



And regular ol' swings of course:





This slide made you work for it. No easy ladder to climb. You had to maneuver your way up there . . . and it wasn't easy!



Most of the parks we've come across has at least one of these permanent table tennis / ping pong tables:



I should look for some paddles and balls.

This sign means "Protected green plant". And it also made me want to email my mother-in-law. ;)



Then we came home and fed the kids some protein and fruit to go with the tortillas already in their bellies. :)

Just the other night we set out on a walk with a "maybe park" Jason was calling it. I think he just wasn't sure if there was a Spielplatz there or not. But, we headed for this old Wasserturm (water tower) in our borough / locality. Actually I think our area is one of the former boroughs and we're now grouped in with a different larger one, but whatever: we headed for the area water tower and discovered one of the coolest playgrounds we've seen so far:



Check out that slide!

A little perspective of the slide with Easton (who is 53 inches tall). (Tall slide, huh???)



He worked his way up the side of the slide like that.



Upon reading about that water tower, it sounds like the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany was at this very site in a now demolished building. :( Kinda feels like we shouldn't be running around laughing and playing there, you know?

More pulleys and fun things to do with sand:



There were various small things to do around this path:



As we walked and discovered more we came upon these . . .



In ground trampolines!!!! There were two of them. They're not quite the same as our trampoline at home but hey, we'll take it!

We found yet another Spielplatz at that park but by then it was starting to rain big time and we had to make our way home in the down pour. We'll definitely have to go back to that one soon!