Highschool aerobics

Just behind my apartment building there is a high school. As you might expect it can be a little noisy sometimes, though not in the same way that schools are noisy 'back home'.

Gone is the noisy school bell, replaced by some rather pleasant music to mark the beginning and end of each class (think: the music that they'd play in between rounds of a weekday afternoon TV quiz show). Then in mid-morning I can hear some energetic marching-band music played at maximum volume to get the blood pumping as the students do laps of the playground. Then it all stops and the music is replaced by someone barking orders over a loudspeaker as the students do their daily aerobics routine. (Until I can figure out how to successfully embed youku videos, here is a link to a video of a particularly enthusiastic student doing his school exercise routine, which I found unreasonably amusing.)

Then there is the mysterious repetition throughout the day of someone counting up from one to eight (again, over a very loud loudspeaker). I found out sometime later that this is just to keep the rhythm going as students perform their regular eye massages, after staring at textbooks for way too long.