Birthday Invitation

Anyone who thinks they can make it to Dan's 5th Birthday Party is invited. No need to bring a gift if you spring for airfare.

Also, my sister asked a question regarding the last blog. Shipping is expensive, there is no way around it. It is even more to ship things from China to the U.S. than it is to ship the other way around. (This, I guess, is why we have not been flooding people's mailboxes with letters and gifts). Also, most of the keyboards on computers here are just the same as in the United States. Every once in a while you will see one that has some characters on them. There are two types of Chinese writing. One is pinyin. This is writing using English letters and words are spelled out how they sound. Pinyin is how I have been writing the few words on here, such as boudza and ni hao. Pinyin is very rarely used. The more common writing is with characters. The computers have a system in which the characters can be typed, but it is difficult to use (for the Chinese). There are tens of thousands of characters, and so to type one, you have to hit a combination of different keys. So to type a certain character, you have to hit a group of keys until that character is created (I guess the combination is based on pinyin, but I am not sure). This means that typing a single character can involve typing 4 or 5 different keys on the keyboard. Our office computers are often set to this Chinese setting, so every once in a while you will just sit down, start typing, and on the screen will be Chinese characters. Pinyin typing is also very difficult, because there are four tones in the Chinese language (an up tone, a down tone, a falling and rising tone, and a neutral tone). Each tone is written out in the word with signals over the letters, so that its meaning (based on the tone) can be understood. For example, the simple word "ma" can mean many different things based on what tone it is said in, including: mother, hemp, sesame, numb, game, horse, morphine, headboard, mark, and to scold. It is these tones that make Chinese difficult; otherwise the language would be much simpler.

I will try to post again shortly.