Tuesday March 11, 2008: Morning Exercises and Breakfast

Jocelyn Writes:

Hello everyone!! Today Ben has joined our blogging effort. He dictated his entry to me. Enjoy! Much love-Joc

Ben Says:

Today I am going to tell you about morning exercises. We go out to morning exercises in the playground. Then someone says something in Chinese. The music starts and the kids do their morning exercises.

This is how you do the morning exercises:
You pause for a second then squat down for about 9 seconds then you come back up and wave your arms.
Then you cross your arms, turn your body to the right and pat your chest. Then you do the same thing to the left and repeat 4 times.
Then you run in place for 4 times and then lunge forward and put your arms behind back. You do this lunge part 4 times.
Then you put your arms out and then you pull them back in and then put one of your hands like the handle of a teapot to the side and reach your other arm over your head.
Make a fist and bend your arm up by your cheek and then do that with the other arm. Do this 2 times.
Then jump forward and back 2 times.
Put your arms over your head 2 times.
Make a butterfly with your hands and raise your butterfly above your head.
That's all I can remember now.
When I learn the rest I will tell you.

--Ben

Ayden Writes:

For today’s blog entry, I will be writing about what people eat for breakfast in China. We don’t live in a house, we live in dorm room; and we don’t have a kitchen so we eat in the cafeteria. Chinese breakfast is very different than the breakfast in America. First of all, Chinese people don’t eat cereal, instead they eat sandwiches. Also, in China we eat hard-boiled eggs, muffins, cookies, flat strudel, corn bread and a lot of other stuff for breakfast. We also have a kind of soup that is called “she fan”, it is a really gross soup made of red beans and rice.

I am going to describe the sandwiches to you. Okay first of all, you only eat them for breakfast. The bread for the sandwiches looks like pita bread and an English muffin. You get to choose what you want in your sandwiches. Some things you put in the sandwiches are peanuts with celery, rice noodles with green seaweed, cucumbers, bok choy and a bunch of other things. I think that the food for breakfast is really good. Breakfast is my favorite meal, because of the sandwiches. I know that in the states we usually eat sandwiches for lunch, but these are much better than the sandwiches my dad makes for lunch.

When we first arrived in China it was Spring Festival school vacation. During vacation, we ate a different breakfast then we do now. At breakfast during vacation, the cooks in the school kitchen tried to serve us an American food, but it ended up looking a lot more like a Chinese breakfast. They served fried eggs, toast, shi fan and green things. Also when we ate, a girl would stand around the table and wait until we were done. At breakfast, we would drink this kind of milk that was sweet—it didn’t taste like milk.

Both breakfasts are very good.