Before moving to San Francisco, I gave away one of my prized possessions - an erhu. I got it when I was in Shanghai. It was during May Day week vacation. I was thinking to myself, "Well... it's only got two strings... how hard could it be to learn how to play it? I could probably get some music out of it in a week." To be honest, the best that I could do was to try to not get dead cow sounds out of it. I was leaving the office one day with it in the case and one of the guards at work asked me in mandarin if it was an erhu. I told him yes. Then he asked me if he could play it. He just started ripping away at it playing some amazing chinese folk tune. It was really impressive. He was really incredible. Anyway, I kind of promised myself that one day, I would try to do better and get more than dead cow sounds out of my erhu. I was walking around in Chinatown and I saw a sign for erhu classes at the Clarion Music Center. They have classes Saturday evening and it's only $15 for a lesson. They told me that the erhu teacher is out sick today but I bought an erhu for next week's class and that's a picture of it.