These past few days have been rock solid, a 10 out 10. This is primarily due to a the following reasons:

1) If you google “Eric Hu,” guess which site pops up? That’s right, biatches (or, as Steven up in Beijing inexplicably spells it, biotches), it’s this blog right here. Which means that in this past year, I’ve leapfrogged past all the other Eric Hu’s floating out there on the web. It seems like all the other Eric Hu’s on the web are electrical engineering students. My more ambitious goal, however, is to get on 10 Hottest on Chinabloglist. Unfortunately, Keith advised me that to get on this will either require many people to access my blog through Chinabloglist (and not directly), or a defiant act from the Blogger Gods to make this so. All you hackers out there, please drop me a line.

2) On Sunday, I went to the Basquiat exhibit at one of Shanghai’s handful of modern art galleries. I did some reading on him before the show because I wanted to seem smart in front of my companion(s), but I got thrown for a loop when I actually saw his illustrations on display in person. A lot of it looked like stuff that my right foot could have drawn, and it left me bewildered and confused…and I guess that’s why it works. I felt more enriched and anxious after the show than I did before, and out of all of that I was happy to learn that there was an ounce of culture in me after all. Either that, or I had to take a monster whiz, which I did…and then I couldn’t figure out if it was the art or not after all.

3) I really like the blue sweater that I bought in the States, and after wearing it for the first time on Saturday I wore it for a few hours on Sunday night, and then again today. There was a time in my life when I would be embarrassed to wear the same thing multiple times in a span of a week, but here in China I’ve learned that this is the norm. I’ve seen some co-workers wear the same pair of pants four days in a row, and God knows what this means for their undergarments.

4) The canteen in my office building now serves rice combo dishes in addition to the donkey manure they usually. This is good news because Mike and I always talk about how anything decently runny and tasty (basically, sauce) served atop white rice is heavenly. Back in college I used to make a pot of rice, then open a can of campbell’s “cream of ____” and mix the two. Our favorite dish at Xin Wang is runny egg and beef/shrimp over rice. We love Indian food because all it is is sauce and rice. And now, I’ll have sauce and rice at work, too. Almost makes me forget that my office is far out in the middle of nowhere that the rice I enjoy so much is probably grown right around the corner.

5) My parents are leaving on Thursday, which means the maid and I can finally play Twister in the nude like we did before.