I have often tried to decipher the underlying reasons behind this. The stark and persistent differences between the Uncleji and the Auntyji type of questions. Back from my first ever overseas stint, I was obviously OK with talking about the experience, but only if I was asked the right questions. Unclejis asked the interesting ones like "Did you ride a Harley-Davidson?" and Auntyjis asked numerically oriented ones like "So how many months did you say you had spent there?"
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I could almost hear the mental calculator going clickety-clack multiplying the number of months by the average amount of dollars an US tripper is assumed to save per month. Never mind that my savings were next to nothing, all of it salted away on travel trips but I wasn't revealing that to the Auntyjis yet. This lack of funds would be my trump card, my escape route, when the real emergencies arose.
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Then in the midst of one busy afternoon at work, the lightning bolt of logic struck, of why Auntyjis should be so obsessively concerned with data collection and match making. There was such a variety of 'products' on the 'market', in all sizes and shapes, qualifications and employments. There were good deals and bad deals, steal one-off deals and fake too-good-to-be-true deals. There were shelf lives of the products involved too, priceless when high stakes bargaining was in progress. Sometimes it was with the window frame of mind, and other times it was with a serious frame of mind. But this was a urge they could never ever resist. This was shopping!
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