What is your personal playground?

when i was a kid, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to have a television. i don't remember having a radio either. we would always go to our aunt's house to watch tv from 7-9pm. my personal playground would be sitting beside the bookshelf in my aunt's house during daytime. i called it the "little library". i still do that whenever i go visit the family home, coz my aunt's house is just beside ours. there's about a thousand reading materials in the shelf. i started borrowing books from my aunts when i was a kid. i loved to read. i still do. when i was 7, my hometown is my world. i've never gone anywhere else. but when i learned to read, i discovered that the world is bigger than my hometown. and my imagination is far larger than a book. i've read old copies of readers' digest, national geographic, time magazine, encyclopedias, pocketbooks (mills and boon, harlequin, silhouete, bantam etc), math puzzles and crosswords. i've imagined traveling and living someplace else. i've imagined myself speaking a different language. i've imagined meeting different people from different countries. for a while, whenever i read about different places in the world... my world would become bigger than my hometown, at least in my imagination. then years later, i began to go to different places. my primary school would send me to math competitions in the district. in highschool, i was able to go to different cities in the region because of school competitions also. i was able to study in the university in the metro/city because of a scholarship. the first foreigner i met was a korean, then a chinese, australian, american, taiwanese, japanese, etc. i have worked with international organizations that enabled me to meet people from at least 3 dozen countries. i've been to 5 asian countries and i'm targeting countries in other continents as well. i've been exposed to 4 foreign languages of which i learned to make short conversations. i learned another dialect in my country, of which i learned how to speak, read and write fluently. i've traveled in all the regions of my country (not all places though) and used almost all modes of transport available (boats, ships, car, train, plane, etc). my personal playground opened a wider door for me. now my world is definitely much larger than my hometown. :)

Liranlog, I am really thrilled to know that you participate in theater activities... and you write drama scebes. I thinkg it is one of best hobbies to indulge in theatre activities... because I think it is an creative art and where there is creation... there is charm ... there is scope of learning.. and improving...I love theater activities... but alas! I do not get much time to even watch plays etc.

My own personal playground is my retreat which I go to three/four times a year, it is down by the sea and it is about 135 miles away, on average it takes 2.5 hours to get to. I become a different person and all my emotional baggage is left outside. I am so relaxed, chilled and I strip away all the emotions. I also get a foot massage and good healthy food, make friends and sometimes there's more! It's my escape, my haven, my sanctuary. I have just come back from a weekend away and my batteries were well and truly charged, now I've got a 16 week wait till I return for 10 days!

What a fantastic post liranglo. It made me think and I discovered that my playgrounds have changed, but really I don't have one at the moment where my little girl can play spontaneously. I've been such a serious sod and play is well and truly required so I'm going to put some thought into this, it will likely be a work in progress for awhile. I did discover this evening that if I turned the corners of my lips up slightly then it takes 8 odd years off the mature woman I'm becoming! HAHAHA. And then reading this post, me thinks it's a sign to lighten up a bit and let the little girl have the reigns for awhile.