Family Park

By the second week in March, the weather had turned around completely. Highs were pushing 20 degrees, the sun was shining, the wind was dying down--it was, simply put, awesome. To celebrate, Mitch, Mike, Joey, and I went to a local family park. I think I've mentioned it before, but if not, it's a city park in the middle of the island, with go-karts, a playground, and a big hill with slides coming off of it. There's one main slide that weaves down the length of the hill, which takes a full minute of sliding to go down. That one's neat and all, but the main attraction for the day was the other slide.

Okay, it's not a slide so much as a hillside meant for sledding down. This is all-weather sledding, too--they've carpeted the area in that green indoor/outdoor grass-ish plastic material. (The best way I can describe it is as the stuff the ground was made of in Alec Baldwin's model's graveyeard, where Beetlejuice was living.) The hill looks like this. You get on your park-provided plastic sled, assume whatever position you want to try, and take off. They even have a spigot for lubricating the sled, which gives you the illusion of more speed. We decided it'd be a great idea to come back when it's pouring rain.

If any one of us were by ourselves, we'd probably try it two or three times, get bored, and leave. But as you get more guys together, the desire to try stupid things and show off rises exponentially. So some of us went down standing up, backwards, or in various tandem formations. Someone almost always wiped out, but of course nobody got hurt. It was awesome. I've got pictures of the hijinks here.

Afterwards, we found an open grassy field (which in and of itself is rare on the island) and threw the frisbee for about half an hour. This marked the first time I'd been able to throw in eight or ten months, and it felt about as great as you can imagine. Easily one of my best days on Tsushima in months.