Om nom nom nom nom …
– trees in the Maribor City Park
We just can’t help ourselves. We are like that scorpion who stings the frog carrying it across the stream: it’s in our nature. Long ago we stopped pretending that this time our kite workshop would be a relaxing, fun, well-organized affair, with a manageable number of well-behaved kids doing every step in unison, us gently guiding them through the tricky parts of making a kite, and then, once all the tails are attached and the bridles are fixed, everyone posing for a lovely group photo before the joyous children run across the meadow, colourful kites fluttering above their heads.
Such a kite workshop exists only in our dreams. Reality is much closer to a nightmare, complete with a death metal soundtrack. There are no discernible steps, only a never-ending whirlwind of paper, tape, sticks, strings, colourful ribbons, and laughter.
But Eva loves us because of that. And the Art kamp organizers love us because of that. And the kids of Maribor love us because of that.
Because out of this fiery chaos, which begins in the morning and burns until sunset, kites are born: hundreds and hundreds of beautiful kites.
Uncle, can I make a kite?
– everyone in the park
Art kamp is an offshoot of Festival Lent, the main event of the year in Maribor and one of the best festivals in Slovenia. It is a crazy week of concerts, exhibitions, workshops, and every imaginable kind of cultural event that sweeps across Slovenia’s second-largest city. Since many of the events are aimed at adults, the ingenious organizers created something just for the kids: Art kamp in the City Park. Concerts, stand-up comedy, theatre and puppetry, exhibitions, and fun workshops ranging from knitting and colouring stones to archery, blacksmithing, painting…
… and kite making.
For the third year in a row we packed our gear, packed ourselves, and drove through the inevitable traffic jams to the city in the north, to this inspiring, fun, and exhausting green meadow beneath the old trees. We set up the tables and benches and waited anxiously for our customers.
A completely misplaced anxiety. The moment the first little kite flies into the sky, it’s the carnyx summoning the hordes.
And the hordes of little kids and their parents always come running, overwhelm us, chew us up, and spit us out.
Say, how many spools do you need?
Yes.
– buying spools of sewing thread in a Chinese shop
The kite the kids make is basically a patang: a 46-centimetre-wide square of white paper with seven tails and a single-point bridle. The process of making it is relatively simple. Take the square of paper, tape the edges to make it sturdier, draw something on it if you want, tape two sticks along the diagonals, bow another two sticks across them and tape those down, attach the tails (three full ones on its backside, two halved ones on each corner), tie the thread where the sticks cross, grab the end of the thread …
… and run!
A good man donated the paper. It was originally meant for printing medicine instructions: sturdy, incredibly thin, and wonderfully light. The tape is easy-to-tear construction tape. The sticks come from bamboo roller shades, the tails are ribbons cut from rolls of Chinese paper, and the strings are ordinary sewing thread.
A four-inch-thick stack of paper. Three bamboo roller shades, each 180 centimetres wide and 2 meters long. Thirty-nine rolls of construction tape. Thirty packs of ten rolls of Chinese paper. And spools of thread.
How many?
All of them!
We took 769 spools with us. And we were still nervous: what if it won’t be enough?
It was. Barely.
May I suggest a green tail, monsieur? It pairs perfectly with the white one.
Hell no! I need violet!
– a Maribor kid telling a schmuck from Ljubljana to buzz off
Our kite workshops are always somewhat bizarre. There are kids and their parents sitting at the tables doing their very best to make a kite. There is us, giving instructions, handing out materials (more tape! I need string! bring me the tails! my sticks broke!), and helping people through the more difficult steps. It’s a chaotic, frantic mess from which, every minute or so, another child escapes through the human ring surrounding us and sprints into the meadow with a freshly finished kite fluttering proudly overhead.
And here and there, inevitably, stands someone watching instead of joining in, muttering that it’s easy when Daddy does all the work.
Yeah, some mommies and daddies do most of the work. They have to. The little one can’t even hold the scissors properly yet, and tying a string is very much out of the question for those delightfully chubby little fingers. We don’t pre-select participants, and we certainly don’t screen them by age or motor skills, because everyone deserves to make a kite and have fun with it. It doesn’t matter whether you still travel around in a stroller or you’re a frail old grandmother.
It doesn’t matter whether you still travel around in a stroller or you’re a frail old grandmother: you have a right as a human to make and fly a kite!
When a kite flies, the eyes light up regardless of age.
And another thing matters. A dad and his daughter, a mom and her son, they make a kite together. It’s a bonding experience nobody forgets, and pure joy spreads across both faces when the kid runs off and the kite rises into the sky – a kite they built themselves from scratch!
Sure, Daddy tapes the edges, fixes the sticks, and makes the bridle. But the kid makes the single most important decision there is:
… choosing the colour of the tails.
Some of the kids were so young that this was perhaps the very first truly important personal decision of their lives.
And the kite they made was the most beautiful kite ever.
All of them were.
A little girl told me trees keep eating her kites so I asked how many kites she has and she said she just goes and makes a new kite afterwards so I said it sounds like she’s just feeding kites to trees and then she started to laugh.
Maribor City Park is a protected monument of landscaped nature, with ponds and winding paths, tree-lined avenues and pavilions. There is a rose hill, a children’s playground, an aquarium, and numerous tall trees providing welcome shade during these hot summer days.
The Maribor Embellishment Society began landscaping the City Park in 1872, starting with the area around the medieval ponds that once supplied water to the city’s moat. A century and a half has passed since then; the park has grown ever larger, and so have the trees they planted. Today the meadows are surrounded by leafy and needly giants: chestnuts, pines, oaks, beeches, and all manner of other arboreal behemoths.
While you may have been indoctrinated by parents, teachers, and self-proclaimed “experts” into believing that trees don’t eat, that they somehow survive on sunlight through something called photosynthesis, and apparently drink water with their feet, the truth is much simpler … and much more terrifying.
While you might have been indoctrinated – by parents, teachers, self-proclaimed “experts” – into believing that trees don’t eat, but get their energy from sunlight via some “photosynthesis” or whatever (and drink water with their feet), the truth is way simpler … and much more terrifying.
Trees do eat. And their favourite food is …
… kites.
When an unsuspecting kite flies a little too close to a tree, the wooden monster lashes out with its clawed branches, snatches the poor thing from the sky, and devours it in seconds. Trees are sloppy eaters, and the ghastly sight of colourful tails dangling from their mouths is the stuff of nightmares. And to make matters even worse, they floss afterwards.
With torn kite strings.
There is very little a kid with a kite can do, except steer well clear of the dreadful kite-eating trees. That is considerably harder than it sounds, because children run forward while constantly looking backward at the kite dancing in the sky behind them.
So our kite workshop turned into a terrible feast.
Why are you crying?
A tree ate my kite! *sniff*
Why don’t you just make another one?
Oh! 🙂
Some kids were crying. Some dads attempted to climb the trees and wrestle them into submission. Others were already making their fourth kite to feed the insatiable wooden giants. Meanwhile, a group of fearless girls entertained themselves by flying their kites as close to the clawed branches as humanly possible, bursting into maniacal laughter every time a branch grabbed nothing but a fistful of air.
It was utter carnage – and utter fun.
Even today one can still see the remains of the feast hanging high in the trees all around Maribor, at least until the rain washes them down (nothing to worry about: these kites are one hundred percent natural, sustainable, and biodegradable).
Maribor welcomed us for the third time now. It opened its arms and embraced us completely. We made kites, laughed with hundreds of kids, ate supremely at a cosy little restaurant serving flawless old-school Slovenian food, enjoyed a couple of concerts, got delightfully lost wandering around the festival, disappeared into after-parties, stayed awake until three in the morning, woke up to make hundreds more kites, and somehow survived.
It felt as though a tornado had picked us up and spun us around for an entire amazing – and totally exhausting – weekend.
By Sunday afternoon we could barely move. Everything was finally packed, and we started the long drive home.
And the moment Maribor disappeared into the rear-view mirror, the sky began to cry.
So we didn’t have to.
There is simply no chance, absolutely none, that we could pull off a workshop like this without Mia, Emma, Aljaž, Nuša, and Vita, the valiant volunteers who almost worked themselves into the ground helping hundreds upon hundreds of kids build their kites. At the end of every session they looked exactly like we felt: utterly exhausted, and very very happy.
We owe so much to Eva (you are the best!) and the Art kamp organising crew, to Narodni dom Maribor and Festival Lent, to the great paper man Matjaž Sivka, to every single one of you who came to our workshop and made a kite – and to all the wonderful people of Maribor.
Thank you – and see you again next year!
getting his own parking permit in Maribor! He definitely won at life.
Photo Eva Nađ