If it was easy, everyone would want to do it.

Excuse me mornig good I am now butwith go to buy the skyood I am now butwith go to buy the sky and raise the air.

No, I haven't gone off the deep end. This is a text message Kristi received from Shen Bo, our driver, earlier this week. Over here, you pre-pay for your cell phone minutes and are charged for every call. However, text messages cost a fraction of the cost of a phone call so people text whenever they can. Shen Bo's English skills are not that good so for the first week or so we would always call him but now we are trying to use text messaging. I made up a cheat sheet listing some common messages I might send him, such as "come to our home" in English and in Chinese. But I didn't give him anything he could use to text me. The message above is his first effort at sending a message to us. I don't know if he used a Chinese to English translator or if he typed this in himself but I bet he spent a considerable amount of time on this and was probably quite proud of himself when he was finished.

After scratching our heads for a while, we finally realized that the message makes sense - well, kinda makes sense. The previous day, I had asked Shen Bo to go pick up a bottle of propane for our grill. I think he was trying to tell Kristi that he was on his way to do this. "Buy the sky and raise the air" means buy some propane, which is a gas similar to air. At least that's what I think he meant. If anyone has any other ideas about what it might have meant, I would be glad to hear them.