Tell me about that. The Shanghai Museum was definitely a highlight. I have probably gone there three or four times ­during the ­different visits I have made to the city. I think the ceramics collection alone at the Shanghai Museum is worth the visit to Shanghai. I never would have thought I could have that kind of a reaction to a ceramics collection, but it is staggering to see an almost 10,000-year history of ceramics spelled out in front of you in the place where it happened more dynamically than anywhere else on earth. Then there are the scroll paintings, the sort of vertically hung paintings with incredible landscapes, and the bronze. Everything in that museum is just amazing. It's amazing to look at the sophistication of what they were doing at a time when people in Europe were living in sod huts.

Okay, what's something more off the beaten path? I really like the esoteric, weird little things in Shanghai, like going to the pet market, where you can see the incredible ­obsession with crickets of every shape and size. Cricket boxes and fighting crickets and huge crowds of people gathered around these tiny clay boxes where the crickets are fighting and the people are betting on them.

How do crickets fight? You put two crickets in a box and then tickle their antennae with little straw sticks to get them to wrestle each other. People bet on it like they do with dogs, except nobody really gets hurt. They still do the market in China in a way that we just don't over here anymore. You know, when you run into a really great market in America, like Pike Place Market in Seattle, it is pretty rare. Over there, they are all about the market. It's fun to go into the hustle and bustle of people bartering and buying things in a less formalized way. We went to lots of markets in China, in different towns and cities. There are just markets everywhere. You can go to the silk market, you can go to the pearl market, the antiques market - they are just massive, massive conglomerations of items.

So if you had two days in Shanghai, what would you do? I guess for a day or two in Shanghai, I would say: Don't miss the Shanghai Museum. It also puts you right in the People's Park, in central Shanghai, from which you can see a lot of the dynamic architecture. The Shanghai Museum is right in the middle of People's Park.