The playground and the lodge — places from our childhoods

I was with a girl with whom I'd been friends for some time. We decided (perhaps on a whim) that we would go visit the places where we grew up.

First we went to a playground in Massachusetts (presumably near where I used to live, though the playground didn't look like something I'd seen before). The playground was terraced in a weird way, so that where we currently were was a little mulch-covered play area cut into the side of a small hill. Two sides of the cutaway were gray concrete walls with ladders for climbing up to the hillside. The ladders were little more than small metal handles (kind of like squared-off croquet wickets embedded in the concrete). I started climbing up the wall on the right side, while a little boy behind me near the other wall made annoying discouraging comments, which I ignored.

Then we decided to go to where my friend lived when she was little. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me up to this point, but I wasn't 100% sure where she was from. I believed she was born outside the US, and she looked east-Asian, and I was tempted to guess she was Korean, but she told me she was Japanese. So we went to Japan (somehow — perhaps we "traveled by map") — I recall a cut scene of coming onto the damp, forested shore of a small hill of an island which seemed to be representing Japan in my head, during the dim early morning of an overcast day.

We visited her family's (or extended family's) house, which was a beautiful, open, wide wooden lodge in the woods. A few people were at home hanging out or making dinner or something.