It's a small world, even for 1.3 billion people.

This afternoon, I heard the familiar beep of my text alert. I was in the other room and almost - ALMOST - ignored it. I'm glad I didn't. Instead, I read this from a fellow laborer who works at another university here in Harbin:

Interesting story for today. I'm flying out of a tiny airport in the south [of China] back to Harbin. The plane has major problems. They bus 16 of us 2 hours to Nanjing to get on a flight tonight. My Chinese is not at all good enough for this, but the Father placed a slight English speaker in the group. Just found out he is one of your students! Thank you for teaching.

Pretty amazing that one of my students and one of my colleagues would meet each other for the first time when both of them are 1666.43 miles away from the city and the person of greatest commonality.

Best text message of the day.