Hotter than hot– 39 degrees baby. Celine, Aubrey and I made our maiden voyage to Seepark, because we’d heard from all and sundry that “it’s heaps easy to get to and it’s not that far!” Umm, it’s a massive man-made lake that requires semi-insider knowledge to slip through a random laneway at the end of a random road and walk down a random bridge that leads to this random, but awesome body of water inhabited by ducks, swans and fish— easy, my arsch.
In the end, after half an hour of uncertain trekking, all the while sweating our arsches off, we enlisted the help of a three year old girl with the blondest of blonde hair: “you just go straight and follow the road”, she whispered shyly in the sweetest of sweet German. I would have picked her up and spun her jubilantly around had it not been for her little brothers and sisters staring warily at me from a couple of metres away- like, whoops, they’d clearly been properly versed on the principles of stranger danger. We followed her directions to a T, and arrived at Seepark ten seconds later.
“Come quick, we’re under a tree!” Nasri had messaged me earlier. We surveyed the park: at least two billion trees to choose from. We were hot and sweaty, and now was not the time to be vague about tree locations: “Where are you?” texted Celine. Nasri called, and he instructed in his ubiquitous, laidback style: “So we are directly in line with “the tower”. Huh? There was a gigantor telephone tower or a smaller sunshade hut thing. We eventually gathered that he was referring to the smaller sunshade hut thing: “Nasri, where are you???” I warbled over the phone (for the record, there were a million places one could choose to sit, and still be in line with the sunshade hut thing): “Just keep the lake to your right and walk clockwise. You’re close, you’re sooo close,” he soothed. Celine was ready to give up, Aubrey was quietly over it, and I furrowed my eyebrows and required Nasri to “come to us, we are at the bridge!!” He said he’d come, but that we keep walking too and that we would invariably meet halfway.
“Ah I see you!!” he yelped over the phone. We looked up, and saw him waving airport tarmac marshall style from eons away on the other side of the lake: so close, our arsches!! We trudged up to him and then chatted away about the heat, our mornings and yesterday night– before proceeding to walk straight past our “easy to find” tree: “Ah, we’ve passed it!!” Nasri retraced his steps, and endlich– finally, finally, we got to sit down and stop sweating.
Once we’d picked a bunch of pinecones out from under our back and arsch, we wiled the afternoon away lying under our tree and doing our homework.
Later, I insisted that we take a picture with all our heads in a circle– I’m pretty sure Abel and Nasri didn’t really want to know me at that minute– it turned out to be a really girly, semi-Babysitter’s Club formation that I think only me and Aubrey appreciated.
All in all, a pleasant, lazy afternoon effort by the Seepark– totally would do it again, but ideally, we’d all arrive together so that this intense tree locating exercise under the gigantor, summer sun shall never, ever need to be repeated again.
Word of the day: Arsch, meaning “arse”, because everyone needs a mild swear word up their sleeve for emergencies.