When have all the young'uns gone?

One of the biggest challenges I've found living in this place is the unfortunate lack of a significant peer group. To some extent, everybody must feel this in their first few years after university, a place where you're surrounded by people in approximately the same place in their lives as you. Suddenly (as suddenly as sudden can be when sudden is a few years now) you find yourself working in a place where most of the people around you can't even imagine your life. Most of the teachers (90%) here at school are married . They go home at the end of each day to their family which usually includes their parents, significant other and if they don't have kids, they soon will. Where oh where does a single twenty-something guy fit in? Part of finding a place here has been trying to find the places where other young people spend all their time.
The answer??? Work. In short, if you aren't in school you'd better be toiling away at something or other. Now, since I've been here I've made some friends at a place called Ka Deng Bao. It's where I (and most of my foreign friends) go on a pretty regular basis to get a hair cut or a hair wash. Since hair only grows so fast, it's usually a wash. The only problem here is that these kids work seven days a week from mid-morning until around 10-11 at night with just two days off each month. In short, they really don't have a whole lot of time. This, in conjunction with the fact that they're making about 700 yuan/ month (about $90) makes it relatively rare that we get the chance to hang out much.
All of this is a long introduction to the fact that I'm sitting around happy here at roughly 3:23 in the morning in a friend of a friend's room in town. These past couple of weeks have been a total renaissance in terms of actually having a peer group. A little while ago one of my best friends from the school had some friends start to come back for the upcoming spring festival, and now all of a sudden they're popping out of the woodwork like when you catch the early flight home from Beijing and a couple of strangers show up ready to double team... I guess a bit of the last thing you'd expect, but for the first time since I left the Hound, Cricket and other assorted animal related haunts in Denver it's good to get out most nights indulging in such extavagences as coffee, card games and conversation (chinese conversation for alliteration's sake). So, tonight's a night for whiling away the hours playing pao de kuai for chump change and giving thanks for having finally found some people that, for all their differences (and trust me that when they're speaking dialect, seem huge) really look at the world in a remarkably similar way.

P.S. I'm unblocked.