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At the same time it feels like years ago. Since a lot of impressions has been attacking my little head, my mind is obviously dealing with it by saying that it has to be more then 3 months back since a shorter time for all those impressions, feelings, new knowledge, experiments etc would be unrealistic.

Now (and by looking in my calender confirming that 3 months actually have past) I am sitting on my nice little balcony in my wonderful little apartment at Zhongtan Lu (in my nice but not so little 400 000 people compound) and I can only state that in 2 days, I’ll be packing the last parts of my life here in Shanghai and head back to good old Scandinavia. As my thoughts runs through my mind I get a certain feeling of warmth and contempt. The frequence of my heartbeats increases and an inner smile is shown by a deep, calm breath saying: “I am going home…”  

Life in Shanghai has been amazing! It has opened up a world of new possibilities and the ones who continuously preach about the booming city in the east called Shanghai should have a drink on the house because they are soooooooooo right! Countless opportunities and massive potential in a part of the world completely new to me. I had to ask myself: Have I been re-bourne? Learning chinese would have been “the easy solution”. Instead I have insisted on communicating with body language, using tools and parcels where I have found them to make a small act in front of a confused local who keeps wondering about those white people from the west that playes theater on the street without putting down a hat on the ground for some financial support. “Do they do it for the fun of it cause I simply dont get it”, they might ask themselves. Thanks to my little note with my home address in Chinese, I managed to get home by taxi every night without having to destroy my throat and splashing the windows in the car with my saliva while trying to pronounce my street name.

Cultural diversity has been challenging a lot of times but what a great learning experience it has been! Even though we spent 3 days reflecting in Hangzhou with great facilitation of the Queen herself: Her Majesty; Karrin “The Leader” Barreth, I think my learings will come when finding peace and space at the place called home.Checking out from one world - Cheking in by coming home. 

Daniel

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…photos by November Sky Freyss-Cole…

p.s. see the invitation posted below!

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We would like to say thanks to:

Ice, Toxicat, Alfa, Best, Rambo, Iverson, Yo Yo, Kiki, Dragon, Sifer, Speedy, Candy, Sunday, Ben Stone, Rocky (formerly known as Jack, but it was too boring), Chesterfield and Pony.

The list just goes on and on and on and on and on…

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On my way home from the Homebase one day, I found myself standing in the packed metro train, eyeballing a fat, real-world freedom fighter! The story went down like this…

As the train left one of the stations, I noticed a Chinese man standing 7-8 meters away from me. He was speaking very loud and persistant to the people around him. At first I thought he was a mental case, spilling some sort of verbal waste onto the crowd, but something seemed to make sence to me as he kept on talking. I was a bit overwhelmed as his eyes suddenly froze and locked on to mine. He interupted himself and changed from mandarin to fluent english. “Young man, I am here to tell everybody here to fight corruption because this country (China) is in desperate need of change”. He continued to talk directly to me for a few minutes, and finished by saying “So go and tell all your friends about the fat man from the metro, because the more people who know about me, the more safe I will be!!!”. With perfect timing the train stopped at the next station. The fat man ran out onto the platform and into the train on the opposite side and took off into the darkness of the tube. I was left in the train with mixed emotions being both energized by this powerfull protest and pissed off by the apathy and disconcern displayed by the Chinese people surounding me!

Thomas

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The ladybox spinning the tunes for full volume

-both photos by Søren Bo Steendahl

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- What does the western world think about the Chinese people?
- What should the western world understand about the Chinese people?
- How do you believe that China contributes to global harmony and prosperity?
- What are the similarities between east and west?
- How can you present a positive image of China to the Western society?

Even though this has added to the to the pile of “things I have to do” I’m actually happy to receive them. I think they could be very inspiring for reflections about this outpost and our publication!

- and I could start earn some serious money if I find the answer…

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I first met them yesterday at 11.09am, and in less than 10 minutes I had figured out that one Chinese girl barely understand any English (and she is a third year student in a English-speaking school!), the English boy is a teenager that speaks all the time (and I almost didn’t understand his British accent), the two girls want to leave for their classes in the afternoon instead of staying in the group, and they didn’t even understand the word “guanxi” (or the way I pronounced it). All this happening in the middle of an over crawded and over noisy Chinese University cantina. I was hungry, and people know how grumpy I get when I’m hungry just before lunch-time.

It took me another 15 minutes to convince all of them to seat down and EAT. As I finished eating I was able to see myself in that cantina “from the outside”, and I started laughing. I knew everything would be OK…

The English boy, Mike, who is a photography student from UK, is turning 19 tomorrow, and is extremely creative and talented, while being impulsive in sharing his out-of-the-box ideas. The Chinese girls, May and Claire, both 23, found two other friends to be their translators, so our group quickly grew in 50%. They are all Chinese design students at the last year of their studies.

We quickly got to unfold the meaning of the word GUANXI, a Mandarin word for “networks”, “relationships”, which in China is extremely important for virtually everything you do in your life, from finding a girlfriend, a job or a travel agent. We are still in the process of understanding the concept of Social Innovation, a buzz-word in the Western countries which apparently has no translation in Chinese, but their creative minds had already created three pieces for our exhibition next week. Now it’s time to work, get the materials we need, and setup everything on Monday morning…

My group is one of the 29 international, inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural groups of creative students, finding connections to Social Innovation on everything, from health and cultural traditions, from Olympics to Music and prostitution.

The Social Innovation in Shanghai Exhibition project is result of collaboration between 34 Kaospilot (Denmark) students, 29 University of Gloucester (UK) photography students, 8 Shanghai (China) Theatre Academy students, 30 Raffles LaSalle (China) multimedia design students and 30 Raffles LaSalle (China) graphic design students.

The final exhibition will take place on April 18th 2008, at the Shanghai Fashion Hub, 1158 Middle Luochuan Road, Shanghai, China PRC.

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From left to right, the Super Heroes are:

- Radiator

- The Do’er

- Kasparov, the Gamemaster.

- Mr. Water, goes where the need are.

- The Joker, the creative disturbance.

- Tetrissa, the leader/strategist.

- X (in the back)

- RLZA (realizer), takes the scientific approach.

- Baby Beard

- Girafalis, has the overview.

- X-mental, experiments.

- Moti-Monk, the motivator.

These 12 superheroes used their characters to have a dialogue around the last 2 month of this semester and how the time should be structured. The rest of the team listened in while they discussed, and had the opportunity to comment on what was said. In the end the superheroes decided to let the ‘ordinary’ people take the final decision.

It was:

To experiment with leadership and start of by testing a World Café/Openspace structure for the team. Then the leadership group, will  look into how, when and why the structure/style should change.

All (almost) of the superheroes has their own ‘heard’ of ‘ordinary’ people that follows them, which means that the team now have 12 groups looking into the team performance and give feedback. The exact way of using the groups has to be decided.

- Stay tuned for more experimentation!

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This is the first one:

Old China in new surroundings.

It is packed with people shopping food and barking on prices. The scenery is colourful with all the vegetables and fruit laid out I different patterns. Many of the sorts I have never seen before. The most colourful of them all is my favourite. It has the shape of a mango but it is pink and has light green attributes all over. Inside it looks like a white kiwi. Easy to fall in love with.

The people selling are busy receiving money while pealing potatoes and feeding their child. Honking horns and people pushing to make their way through constantly interrupt my thoughts and focus. It is noisy here. With every step I take is a new smell. On one side a bloody fish cut half and still alive, on the other side small turtles trying to make their way out of the box, but get kicked down by a little woman yelling something in Chinese.

The market is in the middle of the “Old Town” in Shanghai. It is a long street with no cars, but I still hear the traffic from the streets around. If I look up the skyscrapers are all around me with their 30 storages and massive constructions. It is a great mixture of new and old.

A few minutes walk away from the crowed Fangbang Lu I find total peace and the sound of the city is gone. Here in the small alleys between old trashed houses, laundry and boxes with the print “Made in China” exist a totally other world. Old people with beautiful wrinkles and glancing eyes are sitting in small groups playing cards and eating lunch in the sun. They look at me and smile and nod, probably thinking; “that lady must be lost”. And maybe I am but this is a great place not to be able to find my way. I follow the alleys around. Some of them end blind and I have to turn around and find another way out. Many places small doors are open, and I can see a lot of activities going on in the houses. It is mostly cooking, dish washing and card games. A lot of daily life is taking place in the streets. Small kids playing with each other, men on bikes transporting goods while others are sweeping in front of their door. If I keep my eyes on street level it is easy to stay in my romantic thoughts of life in old China. I only have to look up to see the skyscrapers threatening the small buildings here. But I guess the romance about living in this old area might only exist in my head. Who wouldn’t shift from an old house with no water and electricity to a new one, where you can even regulate the temperature? The days of the “Old China” in Shanghai are numbered, but I am pleased that I got a chance to make this a part of my memories from my stay here.

/Frankie

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Stay tuned for more insights in the madness…

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The room we had was a huge auditorium where everybody was supposed to sit down all the time – a challenge since we had planned to move around with them a lot.

Nonetheless we started our program. There was a lot of noise but after a good solid Danish whistle (red. “pift”) there was complete silence! Great, we started our introduction of the three of us, Denmark and The Kaospilots.

We in our eagerness and confidence started without microphone – rather ambitious considering the room and the amount of people. After a little while the noise level and the amount of chitchat raised so we had to turn to the mic. The chitchatting in the young crowd became a thing that was there during the whole workshop – more on that.

So, we turned on the microphone and asked for 10 volunteers who would have the task of observing while participating and then give a brief evaluation in the end of the program – after some giggling and hesitation a brave young man stood up and soon we had ten people signed up for the job.

The first assignment was a listening exercise, focusing on good experiences. we asked the students to pair up, and “tell a story where you learned something in life”. The exercise is about listening and being listened to. When the first task was over, we asked them to tell/listen about a situation during their education where they learned the most. The outcome was interesting. The students seemed to have a hard time interacting with others than their friends. Shyness, precariousness and excitement seemed to be the key words for the students.

The ChitChat was ongoing, and getting the attention was a hard mission even with the microphone. We therefore improvised a focus exercise. Everyone had to close their eyes and hands. During a timeframe of two minutes they should then -in deeeeeeep silence- and with closed eyes, slowly open their hands for the two minutes. It was a great experience to see the silent site of the students as well, at least for two minutes…

The next exercise was a short version of “Take A Stand” . The four corners was divided: Agree, Strongly agree, Disagree, Strongly disagree. After announcing the idea behind the exercise, about different opinions can lead to great dialogues and most likely new insight as well. We gave the statement that: “Education is more important than experience.” The room became alive! Noise level was turned up… talks, laughter, disagreement, agreement, chitchatting and good vibes was in the room. Suddenly the room was divided in two large camps. Surprisingly the majority of the room was standing at Strongly disagree and Disagree. Few brave ones stood on the agree and strongly agree site. We now opened the floor for talks and encouraged the students to take talks with students from different corners. The talks we understood seemed great and interesting!

As a sum-up we invited our announced observers to come to the stage and present their impression of the day. This was in order to get feedback from the group and to leave the room with a feeling of knowing how they (the student) found the day.
Their new insight and feedback was smashing! “I learned how important communication is! how much i can learn from my friends, just by talking about disagreement on various subjects!” sentences like this was presented to the whole group by our observers.

We had a warm thanks from the teachers, and were asked if we wanted to come back next week… For an even bigger workshop! Lets see what will happen!!

We can by now conclude that the cultural difference also exist in a young age! That similarities between teenagers also are present!

All in all we 3 guys can say that this was great experience, a lot of fun and a thing that we would definitely not have been without!

Good times! Strong People! Good vibes! Impressions galore!!

Big up from Anders F, Nicklas and Søren

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Otherwise we’re doing great, planning on being ready Thursday night to enjoy a lovely friday!

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The First Edition is now being printed! /Søren - one of the Mobsters

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