I had wanted to come to China, the real China, for a long time. With more and more translations of my writings under way and talks of lecture tours the time was overdue. And I had arrived in the port city of Shanghai. I wasn't overwhelmed by the size of the port (it has the highest volume of goods traded of any port in the world), nor was I overwhelmed by the haze or the size of the city (with a population almost equal to Australia's 21 million). What blew me away were the bicycles.

Any city with