August 2, 2008 – Beijing Normal University

TIME: 2124hrs

Breakfast
I woke up around 0630 and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I watched movies on my laptop for about an hour before deciding to go online. I was on the computer for about 40 minutes before heading down to breakfast with Michael, Marti, Kayla and Garry. Breakfast was delicious… there were omelette’s, oatmeal pancakes, eggs, hash browns, etc. Breakfast was pretty quick because we wanted to get back to our rooms with enough time to rest and let the food digest. After getting back from breakfast we were informed that practice was pushed back an hour so … we had plenty of time to relax.

Practice
Practice went smoothly. After getting the grand tour of the training facility we finally stepped foot in the "dojo". (In the same facility there’s practice rooms for: wrestling, boxing, gymnastics, wrestling, taekwondo, swimming, and the weight lifting gym.. Before practice officially began, we took team pictures. For practice we started out with stretching and warming up, then followed by newaza uchikomi (practice our groundwork) then newaza randori (ground sparring). After a quick break we went to tachiwaza uchikomi (practice our standing techniques) then tachiwaza randori (sparring). Then I took falls for Sayaka. It was a total of a 2 hour practice.

Lunch to Dinner
Lunch was again… delicious! I got pasta, salad and desert =) haha! The food is amazingly good. Right after lunch, a bunch of us went down to the athletes lounge and played Wii’s Rock Band. At first it was the team members playing. But they had to leave to catch the bus back to the village. So then Marti, Michael, Ligget and I started to play. We started out playing Wii Sports-Tennis but then moved back to Rock Band. We are amazingly good. =) But once Ligget left, Garry took his place and we were amazingly GREAT! We were breaking all the high records that were set by the women’s fencing team. We couldn’t beat some of them, but the majority of them we did. Next thing we noticed that it was almost time to eat dinner (which is served from 1800-2100). Around 1845 we decided to leave the lounge and walk around the streets to explore. To our surprise there wasn’t alot to see in the area. So after walking around for only 40 minutes we came back to play a little more Rock Band then eat dinner. I wasn’t really hungry for dinner so I just picked off of Michael’s plate. There was fish, pasta, chicken, veggies… a little of everything.