Moscow with Kids: Playing Outside ("Little Squares")

It rained for almost a week after we got here. We mostly just stayed indoors. Not very fun, but neither are wet park grounds. Once it stopped raining, we tried playing outside.

Since we are in temporary housing until we find an apartment, we don't have a school in which to enroll the girls. So they play in the hotel and in nearby parks. In big cities in Russia, in between the ubiquitous high rise apartment buildings are play spaces for the kids. The idea is that you don't have to "go to the park," that is, you put on your coat and go outside and there is a play place right outside your front door, or just behind the building. In Russian such a play space is called a "detskaya ploshadka" (детская плошадка), or "children's little squares" (in the sense of 'square' not as geometric figure, but as an urban open space, which are often not even square).

Our guesthouse/dormitory is in an area with a series of very nice ploshadki. We have to cross a busy street (and they have the rule we know from the US of the painted white lines cars yielding to pedestrians, but it must be a new rule, because not everyone obeys it, which is even scarier, to think you are safe and not be. We just assume we aren't safe, even on the white lines). But once across the busy street, we have a lot of ploshadki to choose from.

These images are from the one nearest to the hotel, which we tried first. This was Thursday 26th of September--note their clothes. They are not overdressed. It felt like we had just started winter. Just above freezing, not even October. Locals have told us, however, that this is unseasonably chilly, even for Moscow.

First, here are the girls trying climbing bars. On the left, E is trying one that looks like a net. On the right, K is trying one she called "spider web."

Here, they are trying my nerves, as they ascend to climbing bars far above my head, over who knows what kind of hard surface. This would never be allowed in the U.S.