I remember when we were kids, during the summer our mother used to put outside, in the sun, a big basin filled with water and we amused ourselves for hours, playing and splashing. At our aunt's in was even better, because she had a huge wooden cask filled with water, and that was pure bliss, almost like being at the swimming pool.
We didn't need sofisticated toys back then, well, we didn't need/have toys and when we wanted something adventurous in the summer, we went to the nearby river bank, for a picnic, sunbathing and swimming in the warm, lazy, river water.
With Darie, my oldest, in post-communist Romania, immediately after Ceausescu's fall, things weren't that different. The same river, the same basin filled with water in the backyard and, as Darie grew older, cheap school camps, swimming pools and one-month holiday in the mountains for both of us, as a special treat. We, as kids, and then our kids, didn't need much to be happy.
Nowadays, well, after 20 years like in Dumas's novels, things are totally different. If you want your kids to have fun, you take them to a "water park", where the tickets will cost you an arm and leg and where sophisticated mechanisms spit, throw, splash, splatter water and there are water slides and a strong smell of chlorine.
Today we took the kids to "House of My Dreams", a sort of water/ entertainment park, where we had the water themed stuff on one side and all kind of contraptions on the other side. I forgot my bathing suit at home, so my sister was responsible for the wet part of the day, and we took the kids afterwards (when they were blue lipped and cold) to the rondabout, balls that were falling on their heads, some racing cars and..finally, McDonalds...Ugh...Well, at least the kids had fun, Maya especially, as you can see from the pictures. I returned with a headacke and a huge hole in our budget (just kidding!).
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