A few awkward questions about Warsaw

A marker in Nowe Miasto notes where the boundary of the Jewish Ghetto stood.

Exploring Warsaw with an inquisitive preschooler is a minefield of unexpected and unhappy conversations which I'd thought were still a few years away.

Here are just a few questions that popped up in our first day wandering around Stare Miasto and Nowe Miasto with my five year old daughter:

Q: "Why did they have to rebuild all these buildings after the war?"
Q: "Why were the Nazis so bad? Did they kill people? Even kids?"
Q: "Why did all the Jewish people have to go behind a wall? What was everyone else doing? Why didn't they call the police?"
Q: "What is that thing you do with your hand when we walk into a church?"
Q: "Why do we go into churches here but not back home?"
Q: "Did your grandfather live in Warsaw? Well, why didn't you ask him when he was alive? Why do you always tell stories about your granddad but not about your dad?"

Happily, introducing her to Polish food and taking her to new science museum weren't as intense.

Memorials like this, on Wierzbowa, mark the spots where Nazi reprisals took place.

... And in the early evening

Looking south from Margaret Bridge just after sunset this afternoon, on my way to get my daughter from school.

Mists

November is a very misty month here, when the air is a kind of powdery blue and quite still. It is particularly striking at dawn and dusk. This was the view of the Danube and Parliament  from the Lanchid this evening, just before sunset.

Comparative Playground-ology

The playground at Vermezo park in Budapest.

Thanks to daylight savings time, playground season seems to have come to an end. While the weather during the day is still nice enough that we can make a trip every once in awhile, no more automatically passing some time after school at the playground at Honved ter or the one outside our apartment building. Too dark.

Having young children necessarily means that you become a theorist about playground design. Especially if you aren't chatting with other parents, you need to be just attentive enough to make sure your kid doesn't go tumbling off something, which gives you a narrow range of things to think about. You try to figure out the right balance between engaging and overwhelming, between variety and safety.

In the States, playground design has come quite a ways since I was a kid. Our regular haunt is the one at Williamstown Elementary School, a new, plastic, multi-function structure that is pretty popular. It is in appealing, muted colors, has no sharp edges, and is made of lots of recycled materials, as a sign moralistically reminds you. But it is a place whose functions are very narrowly proscribed -- this is the slide, these are the monkey bars, etc. I don't think kids really like that -- after all, no self-respecting preschooler has ever met a slide and didn't want to skip climbing the ladder and just clamber up the downward part. And at the same time, the structure is a little overwhelming. It commands kids' attention.

In Moscow, playground equipment is ubiquitous and primitive. Rusty slides, unnervingly fast carousels, splintering see-saws. Kids seem to treat them as stage props in their little lives, occasionally useful for a few minutes of fun but by no means the main attraction.

In Budapest, we've met another category of thing. Most playgrounds here have these strange contraptions, which I believe are made by the same company, that are somewhat puzzling at first glance. They are often sets of reinforced ropes, parallelogram-shaped plastic platforms, sliding handles and trolleys. Some come to look like meat racks, others like commando training equipment. They seem almost dangerous until you watch kids grapple with them and realize how challenging and forgiving they are. 

This has been quite enough to keep our daughter quite engaged. She is particularly thrilled with this kind of rope bridge that frightened her at first. We've enjoyed them, but I already heard one of our friends who lives here complain that all the playgrounds have the same stuff on them...