KennedysOnline

[A brief note: To those not familiar with Settlers of Catan, it is a game that Sara & I have played for a number of years. Although we love the game, we have loved even more the many, many friends that we have gathered around the table to play with.]

Historic Occurrence #1

We taught our first Chinese citizen to play Catan! Our friend Eliza joined us this week and she did quite well (an extremely close 2nd). Now only 1.3 billion (minus 1) to go!

Historic Occurrence #2

During said game, I made my first joke in Chinese (that was actually funny). In the middle of the game, I asked Eliza to begin teaching us how to say the different parts of the game in Chinese. We learned that sheep = “yang” (our ultimate goal is to play an entire game in Chinese!). Another friend of ours (Holly, also a newbie) was getting boatloads of sheep. At one point Eliza asked ME for sheep and I replied, pointing at Holly, “why don’t you ask ‘yang nu ren’”, which means literally “sheep woman”.

Okay, so it was funnier at the time. Let’s still count it as historic.

–Dan

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Weekend Note: This weekend marks the beginning of what is called “National Holiday”. This cleverly named holiday is like America’s July 4th. On October 1st, 1949 the Peoples Republic of China was born. We Americans may or may not take a day off for July 4th, the Chinese have a full week to celebrate (we have so much to learn from these people!). So the entire foreign staff here is heading on a retreat from Saturday through Tuesday. We will likely not have Internet access, so pardon our delay in responding to emails and Skype.