Thursday, June 3, 2010

An Interesting Tidbit

When I went to Mexico with my family back in the 80s, we were on the beach and some Mexican children wanted to build sand castles with us. We started working away on ours while the Mexicans started working on theirs, and after awhile we looked at each others' work and were all, "What the hell are you doing?" We were building our walls and toothed ramparts and square buildings while the Mexican kids were building Mayan pyramids. Cool!

Fast forward to a few years ago when I started watching a lot of BBC Kids with LE (and by the way, WTF is up with BBC Kids, running the same three episodes of three shows for three hours-- when LE was born, there was like 5 hours of a variety of programs, and it's dwindled consistently ever since). I noticed that when little BBC kids build sand castles, they're much like the ones we built, but they're very insistent on having a flag. It's like you're not building sand castles unless there's a flag.

Fast forward to today. In one of our playgrounds, new sand has appeared. It's been dumped in a pile in one corner, ostensibly to be raked across the park later, though given the number of kids crawling all over it and throwing it and doing funny kid stuff, the sand will be moved naturally within the next few days. It's perfect, beautiful soft sand, with exactly enough moisture for sand castle building.



How great is that? They're all building little Cappadocia and Hittite structures. The whole sand hill looked really cool, like a Miniatürk Cappadocia postcard, but LE kept running away to the slide and I felt creepy taking pictures of everyone else's kids when mine wasn't there.

They're even making little caves!

7 comments:

Nomad said...

Isn't it a strange world we live in when taking pictures of random children having fun becomes suspicious and creepy? I'm afraid in the future everybody will have their children looking like Michael Jackson's kids. http://arjunpuri.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/24.jpg

Briar said...

That is TOTALLY fascinating!

Stranger said...

Isn't it?

Ayak said...

I think it's a real shame that we have to feel guilty about taking photos of kids. Of course the parents of these kids proba bly wouldn't mind at all. It's just the brainwashing we've received from the society we came from.

I popped over here, having noticed you on Nomad's blog. I like what I see so will be back for another read when I have more time...in the meantime I've added myself to your Followers.

Stranger said...

Thanks, Ayak. I've lurked on your blog from time to time. Nice to see some long-timers out there!

Natalie - Turkish Travel Blog said...

We have a sandpit on the complex where I live. All residents are petioning for it to be covered up with Astro turf as all the street cats are using it a toilet.

Stranger said...

I'm surprised there's not more catshit in our park. Compared to other parts of Istanbul, there are very few stray cats in my neighborhood (loads of stray dogs, but they shit in the grass). More cats have started to appear over the last couple of years though-- few enough that people think they're cute and take care of them. I suppose we'll find out in a year or 2 whether or not anyone's getting them fixed.