Your Fortune is...

I'm a real sucker for a good sci-fi film, especially if it takes place in the future. Throw in time travel and it could be a lousy movie...I'll still love it.

In the Bruce Willis film "Looper" there's a scene where a young man is talkiing to an older man from the future.
The young man mentions that he's learning French.  With no hesitation, the guy from the future tells him that he'd be better off learning Chinese.  
The message continues to build in other scenes, in short - China is the future.  I'm not sure if it's true, but I have been hearing it lately. 
The Chinese have been coming to California a lot lately, and experts believe that the wave of tourism from China that we are just seeing the beginnings of, is going to make the Japanese wave we saw years ago, look like a warm-up.
If you operate gondolas in a place that hosts international tourists,
it wouldn't hurt to learn a little about serving Chinese clientele.

While the Chinese are learning to love travel, and exploring cultures in other places, they are also bringing pieces of those cultures home.
Offshore, there's Macau - a sort of "Las Vegas of the Orient". 
There's another Venetian Casino there; much bigger than it's counterpart in southern Nevada.

Maybe it's the Marco Polo connection which has prompted the interest in Venetian things.  The Chinese have incorporated Venetian buildings and canals in some of their redevelopment efforts. In this article "Faking it in China", we see that Austrian, Dutch, and English architecture have also been added to the unique mix. 

The gondolas in the main photo of that article appear to be of the same design used at both of the above mentioned casinos.
Strangely, some of those same design boats were recently spotted in a shopping mall in Shijiazhuang.
"Venice Comes to China"

If there aren't already Venice-built gondolas in China,
I'm sure there will be soon.

Visa requirements have changed drastically for Chinese tourists coming to America.  It used to take over a month to get a travel visa, now it takes less than a week.

The future of China isn't any more predictable than that of the US,
but they do seem to be prosperous these days.

I wonder if there are any romantic songs in Mandarin that I could learn.