Playgrounds

We drove the kids to a playground at the foot of the JK bridge, a magnificent engineering construction stretching over the lake Paranoa. As we are standing there, no having anything else to do but watch the kids climb on and off the structures, I let me mind wander.

It is always a bit strange to be in a new strange place. The only thing that we can do is to compare it to where we have been before. And Brasilia, as a strange place, is making us find strange comparisons references...

We arrived here in August, in the middle of winter. Winter is not really what a Canadian thinks when at noon it is 24 degrees! The nights are slightly fresh, we need a few covers, but probably would feel the same in august when camping in Quebec...

The whole playground sits in a large sandpit of red sand. The red dust flies around and covers a bit the car and the structures, as it is a bit windy.  It reminds me of West Africa.

The city road network is strangely design (no worries, I will write more about this very soon). With its loops and large expanses of green between different part of the city, it reminds me of some places in Virginia, south of DC.  However I am sure friends who lived there might disagree. I am not sure why my mind makes that connection, but it does.

The sky is perfectly blue, large, very large. This is absolutely the opposite of Beijing sky, white, heavy, and polluted. The blue is profound and it is amazing to see how on the pictures it is even deeper. It reminds me of some old photographs taken of an area near where I am from, L'Isle Verte, on the St-Laurence River. There, when standing in the flood planes, the sky feels also impressive, as if having a personality of its own. These flood planes where the site of my final year project, during my architectural studies at McGill. And the presence of a similar sky here in Brasilia probably makes me feel closer to home, in a very strange way.

The playground structures are made out of logs. Nothing of the modern structures found in Beijing and most of the large Chinese cities. And nothing following the safety standards of the ones we found in DC, or elsewhere in the US.  Actually it reminds me of some of the structures we found in the summer camps I went to, near my hometown (in St-Louis du Ha! Ha!). Same old stuff, from the 70s. Except that it is much older now.

Which makes me feel I need to watch the smaller one closer, as he might get his foot stuck between two old planks on that small bridge (that has no railing)...