The Marriage Market

Well hello! Long time no see :)

These last few weeks have been quite action packed with work, play and my raffle. I've gotten a couple new students that are quite the riot and I've also been hanging out with a new group of friends that are just a blast to hang out with. I also visited a cool weekend hot spot involving parents of unmarried children and lots and lots of bargaining... it's a great place. I also took to the streets with my guitar and put on a little concert for the masses which was quite a bit of fun. The weather has been getting a bit chillier as of late but it's still been pretty nice. I lead a couple of tours with some great guests the last couple weeks and I've made some new friends/connections with them.

Well for those of you who know about it, my last post was all about my Tony G. Travel Raffle where you can buy a ticket for a chance at a free trip out to China to hang out with me and partake in all of the awesomeness that is Shanghai! The drawing will take place in 6 days and I'm getting quite a bit of support which is great! I'm not quite at my goal yet but I hope that within this last week, the rest of the tickets will be purchased and I will have reached my goal! With that being said, if you would like to participate but haven't yet bought tickets, just refer to my last blog post and give it a read. For those of you who don't want to participate in the raffle, you're more than welcome to put forth a generous donation in someone else's name or just as a donation... and that's my sales promo for the day haha.

So I led a 7 hour tour a week or so ago with a nice few ladies from down South. These two nice women hail from Dallas, Texas and they wanted to get a good look at Shanghai. We went to quite a few places during the tour including the French Concession, the Bund, the bird and flower market (where they have FIGHTING crickets!) and one last stop they wanted to make which was the marriage market. It's exactly as it sounds. Every Sunday afternoon, they have a marriage market in a nice park where parents can come and post the resumes of their unmarried children to essentially marry them off. Well this is actually serious because many Chinese people believe that if a Chinese woman reaches 30 without marriage, she does not have much hope and if a Chinese woman is not married by 35 years old, she is doomed. I laughed at this myself the first time I heard it myself and thought that it might be a little out of proportion but while I was at the market, there were a few parents who were legitimately worried and they looked very uneasy. I took a closer look at one of the resumes that a very anxious mother had and it was for her 32 year old daughter who was still unmarried. The daughter was well educated, has a good job and is very pretty (she had a picture as well) but it's unfortunately really hard for her to meet a partner.

I have a theory about this situation but without going into too much detail I basically think that it is hard for young Chinese men and women to experience relationships at a young age. In school, they aren't allowed to have a girlfriend or boyfriend and in college they have so much pressure riding on their grades that it's pretty frowned upon to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. However, as soon as they graduate college, they're expected to get married and have a child. It's a bit baffling to be honest but there isn't much emphasis placed on relationships before the end of college. Well at this marriage market, many parents use agents sometimes to set their children up on dates and such. The agents actually pull in quite a hefty fee as well which is quite surprising. I translated a couple of these resumes for the guests and they state the age, height, degree, job, salary etc. of their children. When I was translating one of these resumes for the guests, the father of the girl on the resume came up to me and asked me if I was interested in his daughter. It was pretty surreal to me that it was indeed quite real. Many of the more contemporary Chinese find this practice quite silly now, but when I was there, there were thousands of resumes on display. Talk about a unique experience.

Well these two guests were just absolutely great and we had a blast together. One of them actually lives out here and is just about to retire so her and I exchanged information because she is very interested in learning more about the language and culture of the Chinese and she plans on doing lots of traveling throughout the country in the near future which is also my plan before I head home. Her name is Bobbie and I hope to be seeing more of her in the future. She is such a nice person and really is a lot of fun to be around. Hopefully I'll mention her in a few future posts with some more stories to boot. When we were all driving back to the beginning of the tour (she has a private driver) she stopped at a nice little egg tart place and bought me, her friend and her driver a nice little box of warm, freshly made egg tarts which were awesome! After we all got back and things were said and done, she asked me if I needed a ride back to the office. I told her that I could just walk but she insisted that her driver took me back. Wowee wow wow that was cool. I pulled up to the office in style :)

Well I've been hanging out with a nice group of friends lately, most of whom are actually British which is cool. Through these guys I actually met a few guys from CSU that grew up in Denver and the surrounding areas so that was kind of a crazy chance encounter. We hang out a bit which has been a good time and it's nice to have finally found a really solid group of friends that I can count on out here. It's weird to see how good of friends you can become in such a short period while you are all sharing a very new experience together. These friends that I am making will never be a replacement for the ones that I already have but I've always got room for new friends. It's good to know people, especially good people.

So I was missing the “big” stages back in Fort Collins and decided to go out on the streets on put on a bit of a show for the passerby's. I brought my neat little sign that says “I don't want your money, I just want to give you a listen” and posted it out next to me while I played which I must say actually drew MORE people since they knew they weren't obligated to drop a coin or to into my bag and people kind of wanted to see who it was that was out playing. I actually was wearing my hat and kind of kept the brim down low while I was rocking out because I had a little stage fright since I haven't played in front of people in awhile but people kept on ducking down and trying to get a peek under my hat so I finally just started playing with my head up which promptly brought on lots of phones and I could hear the cameras snapping photos of me which is always funny to me. One girl even came up and asked me if I could understand Chinese. I told her I could understand a bit and she told me she wanted to present me with an egg tart as a gift to which I accepted and she was so happy when I took a bite haha. I had a couple other people come up and just sit down with me for awhile which was nice because I chatted with a lot of them in between songs or when I was warming up my hands and they were all great to converse with. Lots of people saw my sign and gave me the thumbs up signal which was really good to see. I'm happy that I can make others happy with simple songs and I'm even happier that this makes ME happy. Oh man... laughter is the best medicine but happiness is the cure.

Well it's getting a bit cooler here like I mentioned but it hasn't been too bad and I've mostly been traveling with jeans and a hoodie. I hear that Colorado got a nice dusting of snow today so that's definitely something I'm going to miss/enjoy. It's a love/hate relationship with the snow to be honest but I hear that we won't even get much if any at all out here which is a bit saddening considering it's still going to be quite cold. If it's going to be cold anyway, I would definitely prefer snow hands down, it's what I grew up with! It's always funny to tell my students that “when I was a kid, they wouldn't shut down the schools unless we had three feet of snow” which for some of them is taller than they are hahaha. They can't believe that in Colorado we actually get that much snow but I tell them that we've seen our fair share indeed.

Speaking of my students, I recently got a new one who is so cute I can't even stand it. I swear this time I'm actually going to go through with it and bring her back to the states with me. She is 5 years old, her name is Dorothy (from the Wizard of Oz) and she is the most amazing little girl I've ever met in my life. She always gives me a big hug and kiss on the cheek when I get to her house and she drags me into her room to immediately read her a Clifford the big red dog book. I think my heart actually cried with tears of joy, I might need to get that checked out. Anyway, here's a photo or two of here as well as a video of her reciting a poem.

Well, that's going to do it for me on this side of the world and I know it was a bit short this time but I feel like that might be for the best every now and then. No one wants to sit down and read a novel about me every week or two. I'm getting bored of myself! Alrighty then, I appreciate you taking a peek at my blog this time around and a quick reminder about the Tony G. Travel Raffle: make sure you get your tickets! (Ok so I guess I wasn't quite done with my marketing ploy). I can't tell you how much I miss you all and I can't even believe that I've been out here for 6 months already. It seems it was just yesterday that I was laughing and chatting with all of you back in the states and now I've already spent half a year abroad. It's a good and bad feeling but I'm halfway there and I'll be home in April or May of 2012. Keep those beers cold and those smiles ready because I'm not leaving a single one of you un-hugged upon my return.

Huuuuuuuuuge shout out to my little... or I guess younger sister today as she turns 17! Wow, I don't know where all the time went but she's growing up so fast! Kick ass in your talent show Pinky and have fun with your birthday present that I contributed to. Love you!

You stay classy San Diego (or Denver, Seattle, Anchorage, Sao Paolo, Longmont, Golden, Chang Zhou, Beijing, Fort Collins, etc...)

Tony G.