School Run

One difference between the girls' school in Kyoto and their school experiences back home is that every school day here begins, for the Middle School students, with an hour of P.E. What they do exercise-wise on each given day follows a set schedule.

Each Tuesday they do aikido in the school gym. (Aikido is a modern Japanese martial art, based on defensive moves.) Chloe still talks about the experience of doing aikido bare-foot in the unheated gym back in January with the temperature outside close to freezing and the temperature inside the gym not much higher.

Each Thursday is another gym day, but the specific activity varies, including dodgeball, basketball, handball, etc.

Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the entire Middle School runs. And they run fairly serious distances along the streets and across the parks of Kyoto. Their basic run is a 3 kilometer stretch of park running alongside a small river parallel to the main north-south road close to the school. Once a week this is extended to a 5 kilometer route by adding on a circuit around Nijo Castle, an historic fortress close to downtown Kyoto:

For the past couple of weeks, extra rehearsals for the Middle School play have been taking over a lot of the P.E. time. Chloe was missing running so much that she went for a supplementary run down the Philosopher's Path: