Skyscrapers in China

China is becoming a country full of skyscrapers. And the skyscrapers in China are nothing compared to the tall buildings in the Netherlands.

The Burj Dubai is the tallest completed building in the world now, with a height of 818 m.

Here is a list of the tallest buildings in China:

- 3th place in the world: Shanghai World Financial Center, Shanghai, 492 m

- 6th place: Nanjing Greenland Financial Center. Nanjing, 450 m

- 8th place: Guangzhou International Finance Center, Guangzhou, 438 m

- 9th place: Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, 421 m

- 10th place: Two International Finance Centre, Hong Kong, 415 m

- 12th place: CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou, 391 m

- 13th place: Shun Hing Square, Shenzhen, 384 m

- 15th place: Central Plaza, Hong Kong, 374 m

The tallest structure in the Netherlands is the Gerbrandy Tower. It has a concrete tower with a heigt of 100 meters on which a guyed aerial mast is mounted. It's heigt is in total 366.8 meters long.

Robbie Williams makes good driving music

Robbie Williams' solo efforts are aiding an entirely different industry in China.

The album 'Rudebox' wasn't selling very well in the Netherlands, but over one million unsold copies of his last album are bought by the Chinese government. And not because they are fan of his music.

The cd's will be used to pave the roads in China. The albums will be recycled and the end product will be used as road surfacing and street lighting.

My own Chinese name

On http://www.mandarintools.com/ you can get your own Chinese name.

It is inspired on your name, and you can choose what essence of the name you would like.

And this is the result:

Surname (first character)
Feng

Given Name (middle character)
Wen
stable, firm, solid, steady

Given Name (last character):
nu
exert, strive, make effort

Chinese Keyboard

I always wondered how a Chinese keyboard would look like, and how it works.

Now I know :)

On a Dutch blog I found an explanation:(http://www.blablablog.nl/B1038127581/C115502288/E601033558/index.html)

Han, he studies Chinese, explaines how it works. But it is still quite complicated.

I translated the explanation from Han.

In China you have two ways to write Chinese characters: graphic by ‘drawing’ the character or phonetically by writing the pronunciation in western lettering.

Phonetic
In the phonetic way (Chinese call it ‘pinyin’) they type the Chinese character in western lettering. For instance, when you want to write ‘heaven’, you type ‘tian’ en then you get a list of characters which are pronounced as ‘tian’.

Sometimes you see this: ‘tian3’. The 3 behind ‘tian’ gives an indication of the pitch. This way you can narrow down the number of characters that will be given.
On every key of the Chinese keyboard are 4 signs and the two on top are used for the phonetic entry.

Graphic
In the graphic method the different parts of the characters are defined one by one and that will create the character. The two symbols on the bottom of the key are used for this method.