All the guidebooks say you don’t need that long in Shanghai, check out the Bund and grab a cocktail at a pricey hotel rooftop bar and you are done. We could probably have stayed for a week, despite not being able to enjoy a rooftop bar drink with the children in tow.

We landed early in the morning after a too short night flight from Phnom Penh. Blearily trying to keep our eyes open during the drive from the airport across a still-dark city, it was fascinating to see the sheer volume of smart housing stretching as far as the eye could see.

Delighted we could check in at 7.30am (we stayed pretty centrally at the SSAW Boutique Hotel), we made a beeline for our room and napped for three hours.

A friend / colleague from Dubai, Hisham Youssef has been living in Shanghai for five years, so I had got in touch to see if he was free to meet up while we were in town. An architect and professor, I knew he would be a brilliant person to set the city (or indeed country) in context for us, and indeed he was. Meeting us at our hotel at 11, we went straight to the metro (the worlds biggest by route length, with over 10 million daily users. Very complicated to buy a ticket!) and for a stroll and delicious traditional lunch in the French Concession neighbourhood.

Then it was time for a bit of an art fix and to learn about the new art districts in town. With limited time, we decided to visit West Bund and have a walk along the river. Originally a site of manufacturing, it began to be transformed for Shanghai Expo 2010 and is close to fulfilling its ambition to be Asia’s largest art zone.

The area already hosts a number of global events and is home to leading galleries. Many were hanging shows when we visited, but we enjoyed seeing the vast spaces of the Tanks as well as a group show ‘Desert Garden’ at Ota Fine Arts, Chen Wei at ShanghART and Stuart Middleton animations at Carlos/Ishikawa in Qiao Space.

The children were mesmerised by the dollhouses and paintings in Xu Bacheng’s solo exhibition ‘Island of Immortality’ at Arario Gallery.

The highlight of the day was our final stop at the Long Museum to see the fantastic exhibition ‘Los Angeles’ by Mark Bradford.

The scale of his paintings, sculptures and public works matched the museums vast cavernous spaces, the final room a series of suspended black and gold globes of different sizes hung at different heights.

His subject matter of mapping and using texts from popular culture felt very relevant to us.

Our second day was kicked off by a double run for Tom and I – the best way for us to experience the Bund, at sunrise (Tom creating quite a spectacle taking photographs of kite flyers!).

We did return after dinner to show the girls the lights – it was packed, and we ended up taking a lot of pictures for other people! A note to say that unfortunately Shanghai was a cloudy, drizzly city for most of the time we were there, so we decided not to fork out on going to the top of any towers, it didn’t see worth it. There was something incredible about seeing so many towers crawling upwards above the clouds.

To fit in some home schooling, we decided to go to Shanghai’s Natural History Museum and spent quite a few enjoyable hours there. There is a lot to see, attention is immediately focussed on the many taxidermised animals and dinosaur models, with a variety of marine creatures hung dramatically from the ceiling as well as a large interactive African Savannah animation show on the lower floors.

We enjoyed picking our favourites in a photography exhibition. The building is architecturally interesting, on five levels going increasingly underground, flanked by a 30m-high glass atrium, with a conical cell living wall, with waterfalls, rocks and plants embedded within it.

The museum is located alongside the Jing-an sculpture park, which includes nice examples of sculptures by Wim Delvoye and others, we felt we may have been privy to some spontaneous performance art as Chinese characters kept on appearing painted with water by a lady who could be a cleaner – who knows?

We treated ourselves to a dinner at Canton Disco in the new Edition hotel, the menu generous portions of Chinese stables, served up in a funky designed space blaring with 80s music classics. A fun time was had, although we did have to get up at 4am to catch a flight!