Will the last person to bed please turn the light off?

I spent the night in a cold, smelly insect ridden sex hotel or as described on their website ‘comfortable boutique hotel’. It is situated on the outskirts of the city. I am surrounded by B&Q and IKEA stores and then rows of tiny shops that seem to recycling rubbish. Where are the French restaurants and Zara’s that I was expecting? The one and only good thing about the sextel is there is free internet. I Google (yes it was working) luxury hotels Shanghai and book into the first hotel that comes up.

Alarming room service offerings

My taxi driver does not seem to know where the hotel is which is worrying as we are in the centre of the French Concession and surely it can’t be that hard to find a major hotel. He leaves me outside an office building insisting that is where I am staying. The security guards look at me bemused and a small crowd of office workers on their lunch break gather around me. Everyone seems to be pointing in different directions to show where the hotel is. I point to where I need to go but no one seems to recognise the map I have. I hail another cab and get taken 5 minutes around the corner to the correct hotel. It would have been 2 minutes but the traffic was bad.

I decided to spend the afternoon at Shanghai Botanic Garden to try and escape the mass of people and traffic. The magnolia trees were just starting to loose their petals.

This garden is currently undergoing refurbishment and will be replaced by another botanic garden so I am told by one of the guides. There are lots of preparations for the Olympic themed displays such as this one with the Chinese mascots.

My art director at Corbis had asked me to get some shots of the famous tourist area the Bund and the Pudong. The Bund is a section of Shanghai that runs along the along the western bank of the Huangpu river. Facing it is the financial district, the Pudong. In just 18 years a symbolic skyline of skyscrapers has been created in defiant contrast to the historic colonial buildings along the Bund. Pudong's gross domestic product reached an estimated RMB270 billion (US$38.5 billion) in 2008, an enviable achievement considering that before1990 the Pudong was mainly farmland.

I had to work quickly to get the shots because I was told that after 8pm the lights on the buildings get switched off to conserve power. Sure enough one by one the bling buildings disappeared into the dark night sky.

Upon returning to find my room has been prepared for sleep with my bed sheets turned out and room lighting set to dim. In fact dim is the brightest the room can get with artificial lights probably part of the energy saving directive. There is however a complex light system control from the centre of the twin beds. There is a night light, a lobby light, room light, three lights in the bath and a do not disturb light for outside the room. It’s still too dark to read my book though.