I'll take that one...

Weird bread, cloud cake, bottle of coke - okay the day has begun. Another bus trip with my new best buddy, Jake Chai, and we arrived at headquarters again. This time for a beginners Mandarin lesson. We walked around a lecture theatre pointing at pictures of vegetables and summoning phantom waiters to order what should have been broccoli but probably in fact suggesting that we build a log cabin on the ghost waiter's navel - the tones used in Mandarin are tricky and the same word means something different if you saiy it a different way. For example:

Be very careful if you want to ride someone's horse...

 Destruction of a foreign language done, we waited for our new centre managers to come and collect us to take us to our new centres. When they arrived it was like people picking puppies out of a box at a pet shop. "I'll take this one, he's got bright eyes!"

XuJiaHui centre is lucky enough to be the only centre in Shanghai with actual windows that open, or so I am told. A fact that I am very grateful for. It's on the 8th and 9th floors of an office building overlook the XuJiaHui cathedral and takes up about a third of the 9th floor and the same on the 8th. It is apparently home to over 1,000 students but not at the same time as that would defy the laws of physics more than clown cars (seriously, how do they get all those clowns in the car? It's tiny!)

The furthest left of the three big fellas is my building

The last thing on the list for the day was to find my apartment. I'd spoken to a guy after seeing his ad on Craig's List so I went to check out the apartment and...boom! Found a place to live on my second day in Shanghai.Not bad for a rookie.