A Trip, no dip, and a Successful Blog Post

So, since I split the two blogs, things have been going very well. The home of my old blog (A Separate Peace) received no less than 3,000 unique visitors from the last post about the referral system. Pretty good if I do say so myself.

I have just returned from a trip down to North CArolina to visit Becca. The trip went very well. It was supposed to be super-warm so that we could take advantage of her apartment complex's swimming pool, but the weather did not cooperate and we were actually a little chilly on Saturday. She says I brought the Ohio weather with me, but I think the weather in Raleigh is just regressing to the mean: if it's so nice all the other times I visit then surely it must get sucky sometimes.

While visiting Becca I got to reconnect with another good friend from Oberlin, Maria and her husband Brian. They both just got back from Japan and are soaking up the greatness of the good old US of A. I spoke with Maria for quite a bit about her trip, and she had a lot of interesting conclusions: Japanese people don't eat Sushi all the time (!!!), not all the students in Japan are crazily motivated to do well (!!!) and America cuisine (if there is such a thing) is better.

It's funny to me that they essentially became more Americanized as a result of their trip to Japan, but that's similar to what Ben Reitz says happened to his music tastes during his 2 years in China. According to Ben, the lack of violence in any of the Chinese media drove him to listen to hard core gangster rap.

Incidentally, I've just listened to Biggie Small's first album. I hate to be one of those retro come-late hipsters, but damn, he's got good flow.