CFA Show in China
By Dick Kallmeyer
Pearl River Cat Club had their first show in Guangzhou (used to be called Canton), China on August 4-5, 2012. The entry was only 111 cats. However, the shopping center where the show was held estimated the 2 day attendance at 200,000 people. After the first day, the shopping center reported 12,000,000 hits on their web site.
Bob Zenda Judging in China
The show was held in a 3-story rotunda with people lined up all 3 stories to see the cats. They started lining up at 0900 and the mall didn't open until 1000. The mall manager couldn't believe so many people cared about cats. It was very noisy. When the Maine Coons and Persians were brought to the ring, there was silence, followed by a loud gasp, then cheers. A lot of these people really had not seen cats, much less show cats-there is a tremendous pent up demand here. Every visitor had a camera and thousands of pictures are probably being posted on Weibo (Chinese version of Facebook and Twitter combined).
Seven TV stations and over 100 news reporters were filming and interviewing like crazy. The CFA show made the CCTV evening news right before the Olympic coverage. CCTV has over 700 million viewers.
The show was extremely crowded. A stage was set up 20 feet from Diana's judging ring, where she got to observe 8 young dancers perform every 90 minutes, trying to imitate rock group dancers.
The manager wants to put on more CFA shows.
Diana Rothermel at Pearl River show
