Here I am!

Hello faithful audience, if you still exist! I'm still here, and by here I mean Shanghai :) In the span since I've last posted I have lots of exciting things to share with you. Here they are in some semblance of order:

-May Holiday we took two day trips outside of Shanghai, to Suzhou and Hangzhou...we toured a silk factory, rode in a boat, saw some beautiful and some REALLY busy gardens and climbed up to see Tiger Hill Temple in Suzhou. In Hangzhou we got to see terrain that included mountains and a lot of greenery for the first time ever in China. Photos of Hangzhou to come in the next post.

-June I was offered and accepted a promotion, which has kept me plenty busy since then!

-June/July Trent and I got to head back to the US to visit our families, we spent one week with his and then he headed back to China. I went on to spend another week with mine. It was way too short but so much fun anyway. When we got back to China we tried not to spontaneously combust or melt into a puddle it was literally that hot here.

-In July we moved from Pudong (East of the river) to Puxi (West of the river) we are almost in the Former French Concession in an area of Shanghai known as the Luwan District. It is a lot of fun living in Puxi compared to Pudong. We are much closer to a lot more of our friends and going out in the evenings or on the weekends is not nearly as much of a time commitment as it was before! Our new apartment is also much larger than our old one, which if you tell that to someone who has lived in Shanghai or currently does they are quite surprised because Pudong is considerably less developed than Puxi which usually translates to larger apartments. Gus is loving our new apartment because it has huge windows and tons of sunlight.

-In August, school really started rolling again and I got to work on a new ad campaign which has been really fun and exciting.

-September, I went back to Suzhou and helped my friend Lucie pick out a dress for her upcoming wedding in December. It was a miserably hot day and we traipsed around hundreds of wedding dress shops that were mostly full of dresses sized for Asian women and decked out with sequins, taffeta, silk, lace, glitter you name it. As many possible tacky details were added to seemingly all of the dresses. Somehow, amidst all of the hideousness we managed to find a gorgeous, simple satin gown that fit her off the rack (!) for, are you sitting down readers?, RMB800 or $125. It is one of a kind and I can't wait to see the photos from her December wedding in the UK, I only wish I could be there with her!

-October, I worked literally every single weekend in the month of October. We had PTA organized carnivals and fairs on each campus to attend, and academic fairs to attend, and all kinds of events! It reminded me of my days working at recruiting fairs for the Women's and Gender Studies Department at EMU.

-November, I went on a field trip with our fifth grade students to Jinshan, home of the Peasant Painting Village. First of all, any time I get to hang out with 100 fifth graders is a good day, but to hang out with them in a neat village whose sole purpose is to provide a place artists to work and sell their paintings makes it even better. I have also put my hand sewing away for a while and picked up my oven mitts. Baking has been seriously therapeutic for me this year. I have tried my hand and mostly been successful at baking a variety of bagels including plain, cinnamon raisin, and most recently my favorite cranberry orange! I also have been seriously loving the Smitten Kitchen blog, which has been an inspiration and a great resource for delicious pancakes and various desserts. I am also now the extremely fortunate owner of her ccok book, thanks Heather! Baking in China has some extra challenges which equal a greater payoff, those challenges being the task of hunting down ingredients or asking friends and family to schlep very specific ingredients back with them (steel cut oats, haven't baked with them yet, but I will!). The added payoff is sharing with friends/colleagues and they are always so grateful because in spite of the seemingly endless bake sales hosted by high schoolers at lunch time, we all miss American style baked goods.

-Meg Fenton came to visit for a long weekend, and after that I had an AWESOME trip home to the States in December for two whole weeks!

-We took a trip to Harbin at the beginning of January, located in northern China it is famous for it's amazing ice sculptures and bitter cold temperatures. The snow and ice sculptures were really beautiful t was amazing and beautiful in spite of the food poisoning I got courtesy of Pudong airport food...yuck! Photos of this trip are two posts away!

And here we are caught up to speed and it's almost February, and you know I always save the best for last! In February Trent and I are traveling to Kota Kina Balu, Borneo (!!!!!) for Chinese New Year, then in April my parents are coming to visit for two weeks! Needless to say my second year in China is shaping up to be much more exciting, fulfilling and well rounded than most of my first year. Reading this last paragraph makes me want to do a happy dance, so I think I will!

Shanghai Healing Home

The expat community is relatively small here considering the number of people that are in Shanghai, roughly 24 million. You end up bumping into the same people from place to place. I had this experience when I decided to volunteer with BEAN an organization that has volunteer opportunities for young people all over the world. They coordinate with the Shanghai Healing Home (check out their site!) on a regular basis, which is an awesome non-profit that provides a home and surgeries for orphans with cleft palates. They have two locations, I volunteered to help do some weekly chores at the house in Pudong and after the group of about 15 people finished cleaning the mats and toys we got to play with them. It was a truly rewarding experience and I met a friend of a friend there who also knew Trent. She knew me because Trent had told her about my trials and tribulations with trying to bring my cat, Gus here. I haven't had another chance to volunteer again but I hope to soon. Here are some photos of the babies and the volunteers, we learned that the infants do not stay in the home beyond the age of 2 and the house can hold  I think they said 24 infants at a time and they are a very successful organization saving children that would otherwise not have a chance.

South Bund Soft Spun Fabric Market

There were many things I was looking forward to before moving to Shanghai: eating authentic Chinese food, learning a new language, discovering a new culture, teaching English, living with Trent. However, one of the things I was most looking forward to was having clothes custom made at the fabric market. Luckily, the South Bund Soft Spun Fabric Market has been everything we hoped it would be and more! It is three floors of stall after stall of tailors specializing in different items and fabrics from linen and cashmere to tweed and jersey cotton. Trent received a recommendation for a tailor from his relocation consultant so we frequent his booth and another booth that I discovered regularly. Almost everyone here speaks English which makes the process easier, we can demonstrate that we are from here by speaking Chinese to them so they know that the typical foreigner price won't work with us.

We go once a week to pick up the items we were fitted for the previous week and to pick out what we want made the following week. I have befriended a girl named Niu Niu at a stall where her sister makes beautiful modern dresses and skirts from jersey cotton. She gives us the best prices and she considers me to be a friend, which for me means a lot since I know very few people in Shanghai I really do look forward to visiting her and picking up my latest creation! Her sister made the blue, black and green dresses that I modeled for Trent so I could share the designs with you, my adoring fans. Okay, I'm kidding but really a certain Heather Wilson has been dying to see these creations and I'm not going to lie, I'm very excited to share them with you!

In China, the concept of personal wealth is still a relatively new and exciting concept so it is much more meaningful to Chinese people to be able to buy clothes off the rack to demonstrate their wealth or status than to have custom made. As my US readers know, it is an expensive luxury to have clothes custom made in the US so no one here is all too impressed with my custom made clothes, not to mention you can and must barter to get good prices at the fabric market which is obviously not an option at the neighborhood Louis Vuitton store. I'll give you a sampling of what we pay: Trent's dress shirts are RMB 100 or $17, (he refused to model for me but maybe I'll pester him into a fashion shoot later fingers crossed!), I paid RMB 120 for my purple button down for my satin polka dot dress shirt (which as of yet it has been way too hot to wear to work but I can't wait!), I have a deal with Niu Niu for dresses to be made for RMB 200 or $34. So as you can see these prices are better than off the rack US and what keeps us coming back week after week. When it gets cooler out I plan to invest in a cashmere coat, more photos to come as our custom made wardrobe grows!

The last outfit I'm modeling for you is what we fondly refer to as my 'Teacher Taylor' outfit, Trent said it the first day I wore it and then one of my co-workers also said the same thing once I got to work. I love the linen skirt its very comfortable and apparently very teacher-ish. I have been wanting one of the tie neck dress shirts very badly, and Mom you will cringe at the fact that Trent and I had to google a video on how to "tie a bow tie" because we could not successfully do it otherwise. Here's some photos from in and around the fabric market, followed by some of the clothes I've had made so far. Come visit, friends and family and add some custom made creations to your wardrobe!