Playing

The Saturday of Labor Day weekend we hosted a welcome picnic at Codornices Park in Berkeley for new students of the Department of City and Regional Planning. The actual picnic itself was nothing to write home about, besides that homemade raspberry pie that someone brought.

The outdoor/experiential educator inside me got excited about organizing some fun events thought would get different cohorts of students interacting together. Before the picnic I filled some water balloons and brought other stuff for different activities. I was afraid that without silly activities to break down some of the tension we wouldn't get to know each other and would stick to talking to the people. There wasn't as much interaction as I would have liked but I had trouble pulling people away from the picnic tables in the shade to the field in the sun.

After some prodding we got a critical mass out onto the field tossing the frisbee around. We pulled out the water balloons and had a great time with a water balloon toss. It's been so long since I've participated in a water balloon toss that I forgot how much fun they are. As we grow older I think that we forget how much fun it is to actually play as if we were kids. Unfortunately after the balloon toss the picnic broke itself up and so we didn't have much of an opportunity to continue playing together. Hopefully at future events we'll have the opportunity to play more games and be less serious - I feel like our department is way too serious.

In fact, I think we probably should have used the best feature at Codornices Park and gone down the amazing cement slide.

Codornices Park Slide, originally uploaded by show and tell.