Orient Expressed

But on this I will forgive them. The first few days you walk around you do a lot of gawping, everyone does. They are huge structures. The Jin Mao Tower, the soon to be ex-tallest weighs in at 420.5m high. But the cranes on the new World Financial Center here have already overtaken it. That one will be 492m.

And it's not just height. On my side of the river there is a new Le Royal Meridien which looks like either a cyber-stag or a praying mantis. There is a JW Marriott which has four pincers perched on top. A smaller (and older) Radisson has a flying saucer perched on top, like one of those sherbet sweets. And at night each one competes in a display of neon, tracer lights and illuminated boxes of glass. If you wanted to make money here, you would do it in neon.

Anyway in the end either the neckache or their familiarity gets the better of you, and you stop looking. But they are proliferating all the time remain, often beautiful, occasionally very ugly, but always spectacular.

Secondly, contrary to the western obsession that Shanghai is home to the new super rich in China there are still a hell of a lot of very poor people walking around, earning well under what the United Nations has set as the global poverty line at - one dollar a day.

As a result, one block away from the £1,000 shoes in the Prada boutique and the outpost from Jean Georges Vongerichten on the Bund, there are street stalls selling pork-stuffed fried dumplings and lamb or chicken wing kebab sticks, each costing about two kuai (pronounced kwai) - around 13p.

This is a city where you can eat food cooked to the highest Western standards (more of which in the months to come) and on the other hand explore the vast (and I think in the UK, still largely untapped) riches that are Chinese regional cuisines.

China is enormous (over 1.3 billion people) but luckily for me, in terms of its food, it has all been condensed into this (itself pretty massive) city.

And so despite the changes that happen here every day, and the reports that obsess over the new shops, the KFCs, the Pizza Huts, and despite anxieties in some political quarters that Shanghai is becoming too western, the city still feels without doubt Chinese.

I'll do my best to share as much of it as possible.