Matchmaker, Matchmaker find me a match...

The other day we were in People's Square walking around in the quiet and peaceful park which was filled with about a million people and I noticed an unusually large group of elderly people standing around talking. There really aren't that many old people in Shanghai to begin with and to see hundreds of them together I figured something was up. So we investigated.

All along the paths of the park were these shopping bags with papers with Chinese writing attached to them. All the papers appeared to be following some sort of known format. In many of the cases there was also an elderly person standing next to one of the bags/papers. The number of bags and papers and the number of old people steadly increased as we got deeper into the park. Then Julie figured out what it was - she had seen it on the news. The papers were effectively advertisments for their adult children. They were personal ads. People were there trying to find husbands and wives for their kids. Near the entrance of the park they had setup some tents with wire strung underneath so people code post the ads. Here is a picture of one of two tents. Note this is only a small percentage of all the people we saw that day.



Most of the people in park were just standing around. But in a few places there were some serious discussions going on. You could tell who the "hot" commodity was by the number of people standing around them asking them questions. There was one young man there probably in his mid-twenties who had about 15 old women standing around him asking questions. He looked a little uncomfortable and I think he was planning his escape when we saw him.

Here is another shot of the crowd from the gate. Immediately left and right of this photo are the two tents I mentioned above.