Saying goodbye to Shanghai

After three eventful years in Shanghai Trent, Gus, and I packed our bags and headed back to the USA. Our next home will be in a suburb of Chicago. We're super excited for some new opportunities, fresh air, green spaces, and to be so close to the shores of Lake Michigan. (Ask me how excited I am about living in the path of lake effect snow around Januaryish and I might not be as enthusiastic.) After three years of working in marketing and communications at Shanghai American School, I've learned a lot and met some wonderful people. For the past year and a half I've had the pleasure of working with a really creative colleague. We worked on a very successful print ad campaign for the SAS graduating class of 2013 last year, you can see it here. So this year, we had to try and outdo ourselves. With a little bit more planning we pulled off a cohesive print and digital campaign that I'm really proud and excited to share. The print ad, which runs in local publications this month, is below. I wanted to have a heavy web presence this year since we launched our new site in February, and I wanted to have "shareable" content for social media purposes. So we created a special page on the site, which featured the experiences of 12 students to highlight the variety of opportunities our students have and the different options our students explore after high school. You can read their stories here: www.saschina.org/classof2014. My favorite part of the campaign were the words of wisdom that I gathered from current faculty and staff that our awesome graphic designer turned into mini works of art, they are also below. I shared these out on the different social channels in the days leading up to graduation. I'm really proud of the work I've accomplished in my three years at SAS. I developed and cultivated a social media marketing strategy that will continue to drive traffic to the new site. I was also able to design and roll out social media guidelines to make sure we have a healthy and beneficial online presence as a school community. I'm sad to be leaving this community, but really excited to tackle new opportunities and to be closer to friends and family in the US.

Shameless self promotion: I'm back in the US, so if you like the work that you see here I'm available for hire in the greater Chicago area and would love to help run your social media marketing presence.

The land of ceramics

In our last year in China, we finally took advantage of our location and really did some traveling. One of the places I went in April is a town that is about an hour flight from Shanghai called Jingdezhen (pronounced jing-da-jen), and it is the home of the blue and white ceramics that China is known for. One of my friends from work is an art teacher and has spent his summers working and creating ceramic pieces in Jingdezhen, and my good friend Tina had been there before and loved it. So she helped plan a quick weekend trip for 9 of us and it was amazing. We went to the pop up market where the students sell their pieces, and wandered through the alleys in the village where we stayed. You could go up any of the streets and find people, painting, or throwing clay, or selling beautiful ceramic pieces. It can be really overwhelming living in China, knowing that many of the things we use everyday come from somewhere in this country but never having a connection with the people or the places that they originate from is frustrating. Being able to meet the artists, and see them in action was an incredible experience. Our guide took us to a workshop that specializes in making and selling huge pieces of pottery. It was so impressive to see the men in the courtyard working two at a time to throw these huge pots, and then to go into one of the buildings where a kiln the size of a small shipping container was fired up, and to wander further to find an artist who was spending three weeks designing and creating pieces before heading back to London. We had a fantastic time, and I bought plenty of pieces that I hope will make it without breaking in our shipment back to the US. If we were staying any longer in China, I would definitely go back to Jingdezhen for a longer period of time, it's near yellow mountain in Jiangxi Province, which has a very south east Asian feel. It was lush and green and it's a small city by China standards, with a population just under 2 million, it just really felt totally different from Shanghai and the hustle and bustle of a huge city. The night before we left for Jingdezhen my cell phone got stolen, right out of my pocket, so I was forced to focused on just using my SLR. I think I took better photos, I guess that's the silver lining in forking over a small fortune for a new iPhone. Looking back at these photos, I'm so glad I had the opportunity to travel there before leaving China. I'm ready to leave though. It has been a wild adventure the last three years. I've grown tremendously both professionally, and personally. I'm nervous about repatriating, but excited to settle down somewhere outside of Chicago and have a yard and a garden and be back near my favorite place on earth: Lake Michigan.