Some time ago I’ve wrote this post about public exercise parks found in Beijing (after travelling for some more time, it seems that they’re all over the country). A week ago I’ve taken a local flight in China and got to see another example of the Chinese attitude towards public health:

About an hour and a half after take-off there was suddenly an announcement in the aircraft’s paging system: “Your health is important to us… bla bla.. smoking is bad for you… bla bla… sitting for a long time in your seat is bad for your health, and it is thus important to do some exercising during the flight….”. At this point there was already a stewardess standing in the aisle, and the voice on the paging system droned on: “extend both your arms in the air… wave them left, right, left, right… “, with the stewardess in the aisle demonstrating the moves. The entire plane was following suit, performing all the exercises for about 10-15 minutes: head, arms, legs and so on, all of them exercises that can be performed while being seated down and buckled up. It was interesting to see how almost 100% of the passengers willfully cooperated (this is not typical Chinese behaviour, which could be seen half an hour later in the 0% cooperation with the “please remain seated until the plane doors are opened” announcements).