Long Week

Alright, Its Saturday and I can actually sit down to write something here. A lot has happened this past week. I was feeling a little glum early in the week just from being one of two males in the office, the only non-manadarin speaker , and having no one else working in a "creative" capacity. But then Monday night Keena, our new fashion designer from New York arrived. All of a sudden, I was able to use my collected knowledge of Shanghai to help someone else make the adjustment. Keena is a down to earth a like minded person working in a similar field as me, so we bonded fast, and bounce ideas of each other. The first day she was here, she broke her sandal on the way to the office, and was stuck with limping around until we found a street cobbler. I was surprised at how well i was able to converse with the cobbler, and he fixed her sandal better than new for only 2 quay, which is about 3 cents.
At work I've been finishing up the front panels of an "informative installation" I designed for the store that consists of a tall cabinet structure backlit by flourescents, and front glass doors that will have translucent posters that outline each step of the yak-to-product process. Inside each cabinet will have a piece of each respective material that the audience can play with and become familiar with; so the first "cabinet drawer" has some raw yak fiber in it, the second has some cleaned/bleached/combed fiber in it, etc etc, five cabinets in total. I'll have some photos when its finished.
I've also designed new color cards to fit the new color swatches we chose, and also a sign for the store. Lots and lots of marketing materials.
Outside of work, I've just been showing Keena around, took her to some restaurants I know, we went out with my friends Allison and Evan friday night. Saturday we stayed around Putou, got Keena a phone and some money, went to eat down, on Beijing Lu, got some groceries, and watched some bootleg dvds at home.
Today we went down to an art supply store, I picked up a sketchpad and some pens, so I'll try to do some sketching while I'm here, I need to get my drawing skills back on par, especially since I'm so design orientated these days.
We ended up at People's Square, where three young Chinese people came up to us and began just having a conversation for the sake of practicing their english and to talk to someone foreign.
I've been in touch with my friend the curator about an idea to collect portraits of Chinese artists. He seems interested, and we'll have a chat about it soon enough. We'll se where it goes though.
There's so many little things, I wish I had time to document every moment. For instance, the other night it was pouring rain bad enough to flood the streets and sidewalks to the point that one could not walk without having their ankles submerged. I was standing on a corner, waiting to cross the street, and suddenly a cab came speeding towards me, swerved towards the curb, and sprayed me with a wall of water. It was obvious that this was an intentional attack because I watched the cab go out of its way to hit the puddle I was standing near. I'm not sure if it was an act of prejudice (its still a shock when you are treated like second class immigrant trash, being here has affected my perspective on how it feels to be a minority in ways I can't even begin to describe) or maybe the driver was just having himself some fun. Either way, my instant reaction was to scream out several english expletives, which of course had zero affect, and I remember having the sensation that I was in space, yelling as loud as I could, but not hearing anything in the great black vacuum. Not having anyone to hear your emotional outbursts is a very lonely experience.
Prejudice isn't that common here, in fact most people are excited by your presence (especially Keena, the first black person many of the people in our neighborhood have ever seen. And I used to think that I was stared at a lot!). Every now and then, you'll have a cabbie drive in circles to run up the meter or a phu yen mess up your order because they didn't care enough to listen or try to figure out your baffling chinese. But then again, Shanghai is not a very patient city, and though at root, the Chinese are a communal society, it wasn't very long ago that they were living off government rations. The sense of personal well being above all others still resonates even in Shanghai, which makes for a very aggressive culture. My advise to anyone who wants to see the real Shanghai, its okay to budge in line.