One Million Balls

There are a handful of sensory pleasures that remain impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced them: the first hot shower after camping, the specific silence right after heavy snow, and jumping into a ball pit. Not stepping in carefully—jumping. Launching yourself into a vat of colored plastic spheres and feeling them close over you like the world’s most satisfying avalanche.

We got to do this as kids in the furniture store, under fluorescent lights that smelled faintly of meatballs and flat-pack existential dread. Then we turned twelve and the rules changed. Now if you try to climb into the ball pit, you’re the weird adult who’s definitely a problem.

Someone in Shanghai decided this was unacceptable. The Shangri-La Kerry Hotel opened what’s being called the world’s largest ball pit—a million pink and green balls, enough to fully submerge a grown human being and justify a flight to China. I’ve been to Shanghai once. I saw the Bund, ate soup dumplings, got completely lost somewhere in Puxi. If I’d known about the ball pit, the entire itinerary would have looked very different.