Task #11: Luisen Park

Take a romantic boat ride here. Taking Ryan would probably be the best idea.

No problem. Even though Sundays at Luisen Park are a little crowded, it's become one of my favorite places around the area (and on a weekday). And while I wouldn't go as far as saying that the boat ride is *romantic* (the hungry whale-size coy with human lips are quite the distraction), the rest of the park is with the most sculpted and colorful gardens around.

Well worth the 4 Euro entrance fee (and cheaper when you're anything but a boring old adult), you get tons of beautifully landscaped paths, sculptures, an arboretum, a plant house, oversized chess terraces where the pawns comes up to your thigh, a wine cafe, sun terraces (wear sunscreen), a TV tower complete with a view and a restaurant, elaborate fountains, a water playground, a fest hall, mini-golf, a petting zoo, a Chinese Garden and Teahouse, an aviary (pretty much the whole park with additionally caged birds), a gigantic play field, 5 playgrounds feels like an understatement (let's just say ripcords and trampolines and leave it at that. We'll talk about the German playgrounds on crack in another blog), 2 or 3 performance areas, and perhaps most interesting of all, a sound garden with speakers mounted in the trees playing meditative music and scattered reclining lawn chairs.

Sure all this stuff makes it sound like an amusement park, but this place retains its parkiness through strategically sculpted hills that both harmonize the park as a whole and separate different areas from one another so that each place indulges your inner wanderlust and is "discovered." It's also very conscious about utilizing natural materials in a way to appeal to all the senses: an interactive xylophone made out of logs, bright, fragrant flowers, and I suppose you could taste the woodchips if you wanted. I haven't been able to find much on Urban Park Studies, itself, but I think Luisen Park deserves a spotlight as a quintessential urban park that works with contemporary society. Undoubtedly the States could use something like this.