I was chatting with my Kuwaiti friend Abdullah recently. He said he’s going to come to Shanghai soon for a visit. Sounds cool to me; Abdullah is a lot of fun, and loaded besides.

We were chatting about this and that, and he asked about my Chinese name (which appeared on MSN), and then asked if I could give him Chinese for his name. So I gave him 阿布独拉 (a bu du la). He was pleased. Later I found out the official transliteration is 阿都拉 (a du la). Whatev.

Anyway, I asked him to write my name in Arabic so that I could copy it from the MSN Messenger window and use it. This is “John” in Arabic:

جوان

I think it looks pretty cool.