Play by the rules

    The rainy season is living up to its name. It's hindering me from parkouring after work, and it's also hampering my attempts at laundry. On the plus side, it's keeping the temperature in the 70s most days.
 

    

   At preschool, the students come in by bus, bus since the school only has one bus, they do it in three shifts. So while we're all waiting for everyone to show up, I usually walk around and play with the kids. Among other things, there's a set of colorful plastic blocks in each classroom. It always fascinates me to see the different ways the kids used them. 
   The younger kids can't make much with them, although the little boys are very proficient at making guns. Sometimes they make cell phones out of two blocks, bent at the joint, and call each other on them. They say things like, "Yeah, I'm just leaving work," or, "I'm on my way to the company now."

   The older kids make more interesting things. They usually make cars, trains, and helicopters. One kid always makes this super cool "zoo." It has multiple stories and rooms, and it even has gates tha turn on their hinges and connect the different living spaces. 
   They also have this weird, smaller set of blocks, in which each piece is half of a cube, cut diagonally. The kids seem less sure how to play with this set, and the first time they introduced it to me, they told me I could make a house, and nothing else. They put three blocks together and showed me. "Cool," I said, and then I made a giraffe. It blew their minds.
   Little kids can sometimes seem to be obsessed with rules when it comes to playing games, and I think it's because the games they play mostly happen in their heads. Since they aren't imagining the same things, they have to make rules so that their hallucinations match up enough to happen at the same time. I remember when I was little, I used to play with my cousins sometimes, using a set of horses. We all wanted really different things out of the game. One of them always wanted to put on some kind of parade or competition between the horses. The other was really obsessed with naming them and splitting them into families. Sometimes I would get upset because tehy would impose personalites on the horses that didn't match up with how I saw them. So we would all have to think up rules for how to play so that we could play our slightly different games together.

   That door is way too fancy for that building. 

   I don't know what this building is! The kanji for fish is written on top. It looks like it's meant to store something, but I really hope it doesn't store raw fish. There were a couple of buildings like this in town.