Gulliver ~ The Humanoid Playground
When we found the Man Mountain playground, it was our first day in Valencia since we had left the dirty dysfunctional apartment in Benidorm. We were looking for a destination for our run. The entire family had started running for this trip, since Edie has no dance instructor, and dad and I couldn’t really carry around bikes. The first few weeks were quite difficult trying to adjust to to the different type of exercise. Mom had already been a runner before the trip. Now we are all running once every few days for about three miles.
We were looking on google maps for where to run. In Valencia, there is a huge empty riverbed that has now been tuned into a beautiful park that twists all through the city for over five miles. The paths in the park looked pretty nice to run on, so we zoomed in onto the paths. An enormous cement circle with what looked like a huge man laying down in it caught our eye. We made this our goal destination.
As we arrived at the skyward facing man we were greeted not only by an incredibly huge sculpture, but also a huge playground. The sculpture was the playground. It was Gulliver from Gulliver’s Travels. We climbed up the ropes that secured him down as read in the book, and saw that the coat tail and folds of his clothes were slides and the pockets were caves. For the rest of the week, Edie and I returned to play on Gulliver, the Man Mountain. We especially liked the coat tail, because this article of clothing just so happened to be the biggest and best slide we had ever seen.
Another thing that surprised us about Gulliver was the lack of safety on the playground. There weren’t any handrails or guards, and you could very easily fall off the structure and break your leg (it thankfully didn’t happen to us, but we’re certain it happens regularly). The Playground would never be allowed to be built in the US because of the danger of falling off, but that didn’t stop Edie and me from playing there every day.
SLO Lerners 