On the recommendation of a number of people we have met on this leg of our trip, we have decided to take a short detour from our original route and visit Shanghai. Billed as the home-grown communist alternative to the financial might of Hong Kong, it is a thriving metropolis and the seat of many financial and commercial businesses in China. As we expected there is a huge amount of construction and renovation work going on to make the city the home of modernity for China. The architects have obviously been given free reign and have had a field day at the tax payers expense - no joking, many of the buildings would have looked right at home in Gotham City! The area of Pudong is on the opposite bank of the river from Shanghai and is now effectively a borough of the city but is actully bigger than Shanghai itself and is almost a brand new city in it's own right. The showpiece building here is the 88-story Jin Mao building which is the tallest in China and third tallest in the world. One of the key things that we wanted to see was the Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre. We were not disappointed. For an hour and a half we were presented with tumbling acrobats, jugglers, contortionists, spinners and balancing acts. They really knew how to put on a show with amazing costumes, spectacular choreography and brilliant lighting - in all it would not have been out of place in the West End or Broadway. The most amazing thing of all, apart from seeing Chinese men built like the proverbial sh*t house (no steroids there then), were the tiny little girls who would take the big tumbles to land on the shoulders of a man on top of a column of acrobats. They could have been no older than 8 or 9 years of age and were getting their bodies into all sorts of shapes - definetley not good for their growth and development. Other than that, Shanghai seems to be one big shopping mall with every designer brand you could ever imagine. Clearly people are not short of cash in the big cities that run on the capitalist system and the enormous malls were thriving with the sales of Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada - without a fake in sight! Our last stop on this world trip will be Beijing where we plan to take in at some of the history and culture of China, which seems to be missing from many other cities, before taking our final flight home.