The world in our backyard

Want to meet lots of cool international women in your community? I suggest your neighborhood playground. Thursday mornings the boys and I often attend a playgroup with women from our church that meets at different playgrounds in our part of San Diego. It is a nice time for the kids to play and steal each others' toys, and for the Moms to talk. Joseph also provides lots of opportunities to meet the other women by "borrowing" their kids' trucks or shovels or snacks, and just trying to play with the kids in his cute and awkward 2-year-old way. Last week and this week there were quite a few people not in our group already at the playgrounds, and amazingly not one of them were American. Yesterday I met women from Israel, Germany, Poland, and Japan; other days I've met women from Slovakia, Austria, Canada, Russia, and China. These are all very impressive women, too. They look happy and are well dressed, easy to start up a conversation with, intelligent, and wonderful with their kids - the kind of women in tv commercials, playing tag up and down slides and ladders and across monkey bars, generally enjoying their children, and looking really good while doing it. Ok, this is mostly the European women (especially Germans) more than the Asians. Why no Americans, though? A few hypotheses I have:

• Americans all have their own private backyards. Europeans and Asians are more comfortable with community spaces like playgrounds, and they're also only here for a few years so they don't own a home.
• American women are at work during the day and their kids are in daycare. Foreign women are here for their husbands' jobs and they don't have the visas to work themselves.
• San Diego women are unphased by beautiful weather in March, whereas women from all these other places are only here for a few years until they go back to northern Europe or something and they want to get their lifetime quota of sunshine.

Anyway, just some observations. And good opportunities to practice my German if I get up the courage.