Exercise in Qingdao

On the way to Dr. Paul's Language School every day we saw restaurant employees exercising out on the sidewalks . Sometimes they did exercises all together while counting (1, 2, 3, 4 in Chinese is "yi, er, san, si"), and other times they jumped rope or played badminton or hackysack.




We also saw small exercise areas at apartments and shopping areas for children as well as adults. We saw several very large work-out gyms in our part of Qingdao. Badminton, tennis, and table tennis are very common. One of the young ladies that I read with plays tennis several times a week. When I asked another one of my readers about China's chances in the Olympics this summer, she said that China always does well in table tennis.

Basketball is also popular. We saw many basketball shirts with U.S. team symbols, and we had several young men stop us on the street and ask us about different U.S. teams and the recent games. One of our 17-year-old readers wore many different basketball shirts to our reading sessions. (The same young man also has a tennis coach that gives him lessons several times a week.)
The following is a photo of some boys playing basketball in a school yard.


Notice the man standing against the fence. He evidently is supposed to be sweeping up trash. Maybe if you enlarge the picture, you can see the kind of broom that he is using. That homemade-looking broom is the most common type. The broom in the picture appears to have a longer handle than most. Most of them have very short handles, and one has to bend over to use them---sure makes for a sore back if you use it very long! The one in our apartment was the size of a child's broom!