Sapporo - Play Time with the Elements

8th April, 2009 - Park Time. After indulging our cake fetish yesterday, we had to make up for lost time with L-kun, and that could mean only one thing. Park time. Now - it was well into April , and you might expect Spring to have made it's presence felt already.  And I suppose it had - the snow had all but melted from the Sapporo itself, although the mountains still loomed high above with a fairly thick coating of snow. Yet, the air itself threatened to remember that winter was not that long passed. And indeed the heavens themselves seemed ready to open in defiance. Yet T-chan and I were close enough to home that we felt reasonably confident that we could risk the weather for a run around in the park.

T-chan took L-kun to her old stamping ground... this park was right next to her old primary school, and indeed this small hill was where she learnt to ski on.

Well, skiing was out this time around, but there was still plenty of opportunities to fall down on your.... well, you know. The part built with all the padding. Daddy. And when you couldn't fall down on Daddy, there was always the ground.

One of the things that I love about Sapporo is that you're never far from the mountains, and as I mentioned in my other blog, whilst T-chan is a beach girl, I'm definitely a mountains boy. I always feel so calm and refreshed when I look out to see the backbone of the earth, rising up above the horizon. Makes me feel closer somehow to a Secret of life (no, I'm not Rhonda Byrne's ghost writer)... A stillness of the soul. A meeting place of the elements of fire, earth, air and water. Hmmm... maybe that's laying it on just a little too thick?

Anyhow, I hope that L-kun absorbs some of that magical feeling of the city, and that he comes to appreciate the wonder of the world just that little bit more. And if not, that he can appreciate it for a special kind of beauty... or at least a great, rugged backdrop to a game of ball.

And finally, one last word on parks. I think it's so great that they have these big, artificial hills around in the suburbs... in this day and age of litigiousness, it's nice to think that the council's can still allow children to be children. To learn from their bumps and bruises. And to just have fun... whether it's learning to ski, or running down a hill - and occasionally falling down. Isn't that what life is about?

You have to learn to get up after a fall, dust yourself off - and try again.