07/04/2009 Happy July 4th!
My cousin's wife emailed us this week with a request. His school in the UK is having a "Countries of the World" day, and my cousin's classroom of 8 and 9 year olds have chosen to do America. The request was for us to send an email from America to the students, along with pictures of American things that are not typically seen in England. For the past few days we've been considering this assignment and thinking about what we can include in this email.
My cousin suggested we take a picture of a hot dog stand, which I agree is a very American symbol. My major concern with that is that for their entire lives, this group of English youngsters will be under the impression that the American diet consists exclusively of leftover ground meat products enclosed by a casing and stuck in a bun. Then I cringe a little, because when we had this cousin's brother here for a visit a couple weeks ago, 60% of our meals consisted of a hotdog, hamburger, or other large slab of meat. We did the "walking home from the bar after midnight let's stop at Weiner's Circle! " meal, and the "We're at Wrigley Field- we have to get hotdogs! " meal, both within 16 hours of each other. My cousin even managed to see a kid get literally thrown out of Weiner's Circle, consistent with our stories that prepared him to not expect normal polite customer service (but a good entertaining time, none the less!).
In our brainstorming, my husband and I have of course come up with some ideas that would probably be quite inappropriate for an 8 year old audience. For example, we could include a picture of a police officer's holster with the caption, "In America, our cops carry real guns instead of sticks! " Kidding aside, we're looking forward to generating this email and highlighting the cool parts of this country we love. Here are some things we may include: In America, baseball is a very popular sport. Go Cubs! In the city of Chicago, we have some very tall buildings (check out the comparison of Sears Tower with one of the tallest buildings in London!) In America, we get some very powerful thunder and lightning storms! In America, bacon + anything = Heaven! In America, we have cats who can read and write! As you can see, this is a work in progress: -) Happy Independence Day!
