Cultist ritual

8:55am each morning at work, we do the morning exercise, aka the cultist ritual.  There's a series of beeps that comes out of the building PA system, followed by an all-too-cheery voice and music announcing it's the morning exercise time.  So each morning, the beeps come on.. then you can see over the low cubicle walls the heads of individuals slowly start popping up one-by-one... like zombies coming out of their graves.  The beeps are accompanied by countdowns displayed on TV sets placed along the walls... and on the screens, they have people demonstrating the stretch moves.  After about 8 stretching routines, we go into the high-fives......That's right, we do high-fives every morning.  "To brighten up the mood" they say....  "High-five! High-five!"  I'm slowly, day after day, increasing the amount of force I put into these high-fives... hopefully, one day I can make somebody bleed or break a wrist.  

Many Korean companies and most schools have morning exercise routines.  When I was in elementary school here in Korea, I remember we used to do the morning exercises out on the field before the school day started.  

  

There's even a NATIONAL exercise routine (called "Kook-min-che-jo") with accompanying music.  A lot of Koreans still know the sequence of movements for this 5-minute routine, which ranges from stretches and hops to squats and lunges.

Normally, I prefer to move as little a muscle during mornings so I prefer to sit on my ass while others are doing their stretches.  In general, however, I think this exercise thing is a fairly good national habit in order to start circulating the blood early in the day.

If Yuna Kim was on TV screens at work demonstrating stretch routines, I may actually make it to work on time each morning and stretch.