Festival Playground

Alternate title for this post: "Look, there are children tied to that trash." 

J and I went into the city centre (or downtown, as I Americanly call it) to explore the Festival Playground that people had been telling us about. People had been vague in their descriptions of it, but we understood that it had rides for kids that the parents had to power, which sounded cool, so we thought we'd check it out.

This was the sign for it, which I thought was cool enough already. Contact is a fairly new electricity provider in NZ, and we have switched to them and like them fine. I don't really know why they decided to sponsor a Festival Playground, but good for them.

All the rides, as the sign said, are people-powered. They are all also made of random parts of all kinds of things. Towards the right side of this merry-go-round, you can see the man in the black t-shirt is pedaling a bike - that is what is turning the merry-go-round! 

The ferris wheel is the first thing we saw when we got there, and it was this that prompted J to say, "Look, there are children tied to that trash." Once I stopped laughing, I had to admit that it was an accurate description in many ways. But how cool is that? The seats are a combination of old barber's chairs, toilet seats, and some other nice seats that we couldn't figure out what they originally were.

This one looked like the most fun to me. A person had to turn a big crank to get it to move, but the gears were obviously effective, because it spun around quite fast without the person seeming to exert too terribly much effort. (Easy for me to say, given that I didn't volunteer).

These little bikers were so cool, zooming along this race track, powered by...

... these boys, pedaling frantically to get their little biker to cross the finish line first. How cool to hook it up like that! 

There was also this amazing flag area, which J and I enjoying walking through. It's hard to get a sense of it in the picture, but you really felt enveloped by the fluttering colours when you were in there. 

(P.S. That's J in the yellow shirt, in case you couldn't tell).

The flags each had difference drawings, patterns, or words on them, and at least some of them had clearly been made by children. I saw several that had messages of love or peace or happiness, and I thought that that must be the theme, and then I saw one that was about alien rockets, so I decided that perhaps it wasn't "themed" as such. But they all made me smile.

J and I had a nice time wandering around the little area where this was all set up, and I could tell that parents and children were having a wonderful time. I love that events like this are frequently happening in NZ - it feels like people put effort into planning things that help people to get out and enjoy themselves in positive ways. What a great way to improve things.