The One and Only

In Bacolod, as far as I know, there is only one public park. In some of the sub division they have their own parks but they are private for the people in those specific areas. There are a few indoor play places where you can pay to have your kids play but as far as free and public this is the only one. We pass by it almost everyday since it's just along one of the main roads in the city and the kids love to play there. We hardly do ... for many reasons. One being apparently kidnappings happen there, another reason is that I hate seeing the old guys sitting there taking pictures of my kids with their phone camera's and the most important reason is because I fear for my children's lives.
I decided that since it really is so bad that I would take a bunch of pictures as proof so you all wouldn't think I was exaggerating so here they are although it was night time so they don't capture the true colour of the rust but I hope that you can get the just of it:
Here is a rusted hole on the platform to the slide. Just a thin sharp rusted edge waiting for a foot to fall through so it can scrape my kids legs up giving them gangrene. These 'holes' can be found throughout the playground and when you're a 4 year old excited to be at an actual park the last thing you are looking for is eroded holes. The next picture is of what you land in once you make your way through the rusted holes and down the slide. Not so bad I know, just a puddle. But puddles are not 'just' water around the Philippines. When people drop their pants and pee wherever they want, throw their trash on the ground and spit all the time I like to think of these puddles as little open cesspools. My father in law has always said that public hot tubs are big cesspools and I totally agreed, until I moved here. Now in comparison hot tubs are crystal clear. So in summary you carefully make your way through the rust trap and get down to the bottom of the slide to only fall into a puddle of garbage juice, urine and strangers spit. AWESOME!

So the slides aren't really something we spend too much time on because no one likes to get their feet covered in that muck so we move on to something else. But what!? Everything is broken. The seesaws only have 1 seat and the last time I played on a seesaw by myself it really sucked. The chains on the swings are half broken and tied up so no one can wreck them anymore. I dont' get it because as far as I can tell anything someone could do would be an improvement? At least if they left the rusty chains untied the kids could swing from them and play Tarzan or something?

Now these last pictures are to show that the park isn't a complete bust. There is a merry-go-round that Ryan can get moving fast enough to make the kids happy. Just outside the park we found a kitten that was pretty cute. I'm too sure if it had flea's or some other random disease so the kids weren't aloud to touch it but we ran after it and that was fun.

Now we do have a park in our subdivision that the kids love to play in so we don't have to go all the way to the Lagoon to go down a slide. The sad thing is that the one here in Palmas Del Mar is even more eroded, more rusted and more deadly then this one. I would actually think that Palmas Del Mar would be embarrassed to keep it around and not junk it already but I guess it's just another Filipino Park in Bacolod City.