Saturday Outing: Tuebingen Park and Traverwood Library

One thing we were excited to learn when we were planning to move here is that Ann Arbor has several sister cities, one of which is Tuebingen, where we spent a month in 2011 for my study abroad program!  I don't know why they were named sister cities (although there are a lot of fun similarities between the two places!) but it's another thing that's made us feel more at home here. 

Anyways, last week we were planning on heading over to our public library to get our library cards (hooray!) and when I looked it up on the map, I discovered that there was a little "Tuebingen Park" right next to it!  That sealed it for us--we had to check them both out! 

Me holding my bag from the University in Tuebingen :

It turned out the park was "primarily a natural area with exercise activity stations" (thanks parks and rec site!) but Nikolai had fun running around the grass anyways.  

We had a little picnic dinner of sandwiches but Nikolai was not very interested in eating...

Mostly he'd pull the cheese off the bread and hand the rest of the sandwich back ;)  But he did have fun ripping up grass and handing it to Jesse!

After our lovely little picnic we headed up the hill to the library.  Aren't my boys handsome?!

Hold hands while crossing the street!

This was our first glimpse of the library, from the back.  

And since I didn't get any good ones from the front, here's one borrowed from the internets:

I hope it doesn't surprise you to know that I fell in love with the architecture of this place immediately. As it turns out it was for good reason--the library has won an award for it's innovative design!  It was also specifically designed to have minimal impact on the land around it and to use less energy--by having huge glass windows placed just so to capture sun for warmth and light in the winter but to minimize heat in the summer, etc.  

It also used ash trees (killed by beetles, but still structurally sound!) that used to be on the land in the construction!  Isn't that gorgeous?

It's not a large branch bu we each found a few books we were interested in--and Nikolai found some fun things to play with, too :) 

Hooray for public libraries!