Settling In

Just thought I'd let you know what we'll be doing for the next 6 months.
James will attend East China Normal University and learn Chinese. We've been over to the campus to get some forms and it looks quite nice, it has gardens and little lakes and it is quite big. It's only five stops away on the bus from our new house.
I've signed a contract for part time teaching work with a recruitment agency that will send me out to a few different public schools in Shanghai. I will be teaching oral English, and the students will have a native Chinese English teacher to teach them reading and writing. We are both quite nervous about starting, but we have a week off now, which we're pretty excited about!
We've moved away from the area that had our favourite vegetarian restaurant, but luckily we have our own kitchen to cook in now. I think some of the locals think we are quite wierd when we ask for meals without meat, it seems like the only reason you wouldn't eat meat here is if you were buddhist, which I am not. They also seem to think we are strange when we want to re-use our shopping bags.
We're quite happy that our local nieghbourhood has a bakery that sells non-sweetened bread (a rarity), as well as a pirate DVD shop with lots of English language DVDs. Yesterday we bought five seasons of Six Feet Under for $4. Actually, it was probably about $3.50 after James did a spot of bargaining.
We got a good laugh out of the DVD covers. Plenty of effort has gone in to replicating the real deal, but with some hilarious differences. Better than simply finding copious 'engrish', the official-looking blurbs have been copied off IMDB and Amazon reviews! Half the time they pay out the story or the actors in a whiny film student manner. Awesome.
We're quite glad to have a DVD player because when we went to see a film at the movies, the only English ones showing was Casino Royale (enjoyable, but we've already seen it) and A Night At The Museum (hmmmm). Have to wait a whole month until The Devil Wears Prada comes out, and we already found the previous tenant's pirate copy in our apartment anyway.