Calorie counting in the park

The weather is cooling down and it’s time to get our walking shoes on again and burn off some calories. There’s a popular park near my house where people from the local apartments go in the evening to exercise: play badminton, walk, or use the various exercise machines that are especially designed for outdoor use. But the most popular part of the park is an intriguing circular track for people to walk around.  I find this interesting because if I was going to go out for a walk, I wouldn’t think about walking around and around in circles! But on a cool evening, this track is absolutely packed with people bumping into each other as they speed walk around and around the track (even though other parts of the park are much quieter). The track is about 400 metres all the way around and every 100 metres is marked off on the ground so we can see how far we’ve walked. Maybe that’s the attraction? My husband says Korean people just like to go where there are other people. I’ve definitely noticed this – on a public holiday he’s more than happy to go downtown which we both know will be packed with people but I would rather go somewhere more quiet – preferably where I can be alone. (Yes, I’m a bit anti-social!)

But this area where the track is also has some useful information. At the entrance there’s a sign with diagrams of stretching exercises to do before starting your exercise workout. I like this. The sign also gives information about the number of calories found in various Korean dishes and how many minutes it takes to walk off that number of calories. So for example, according to the chart, a fried egg contains 86 calories so will take 13 minutes to walk off. But anyone who ate 짬뽕 jampong (spicy seafood noodle soup) for dinner will have to spend 1 hour and 22 minutes walking off 482 calories. That’s a lot of circuits around this little track!