It took 14 hours in transit to get from Lhasa to Shanghai, mostly in airport lounges, because of a delayed flight and a missed connection. Delays are part of traveling and the only thing under your control is your reaction to them, or as a Chinglish sign says at a ladies fashion booth:
The body flavor is the dress state of mind.
My body flavor was probably nasty but my dress state of mind was good because I had with me an excellent book: Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann. It fictionalizes the dueling biographies of Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians and von Humboldt, for whom Humboldt County was named. The chapters on Gauss were particularly amusing. He was an incredible genius, but he had commensurate arrogance. Bessel was one of the greatest German mathematicians and Gauss once told him: "you should give up mathematics and become a cook or a blacksmith, but you might find those careers too challenging."
I need to rephrase that line for my students. Next time someone tells me he couldn't do his homework because his tablet crashed, I will say:
You should stop doing mathematics and concentrate on Food Tech and DT, but you might find those subjects too difficult.
Hawoon will thereby end up baking pizzas. Hawoon has commented that I should like China. I DO like China! Just because I got fleeced and a fruit vendor punched me, that's no reason not to like a country! I laugh at those things.
I like China because it's full of art, architecture, music and culture, and there's always something to gawk at. For example, from the riverside promenade, today I looked at the amazing skyline of Pudong. The story is that once there was a marsh, and two year later up sprung this amazing modern skyline, and this was the reason behind the meteoric rise of Hu Jintao in the Communist Party. So, without Pudong, I wouldn't be able to agonize the Year 9s with the old joke:
Who's the President of China?
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