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We first saw Shenzhen in 1978 when we made our first visit to Hong Kong. At that time China was closed to tourists. If you wanted to see it you did as we, and presumably thousands of other tourists in Hong Kong did: you went up on a hill in Hong Kong's New Territories and peered into the distance. The only thing to be seen was water and rice fields. Today it's all changed.

There are hundreds of skyscrapers and more than two million people live in Shenzhen. We wanted to see these changes for ourselves, so we spent our last two nights and last day in China there instead of Guangzhou (Canton). We liked it: although it is China, it is cleaner and better organized than most of China and after six weeks we were ready for that. And it was warm. We had been plagued for the previous three weeks by colder than expected weather. With Jan being sick that was an even worse problem. Getting to Shenzhen we suddenly switched from wearing two sweaters and a coat to just a light shirt or sweater.

Our big touristy thing was to go to a theme park in Shenzhen called "Window on the World". There are hundreds of recreations of famous sites from all around the world, at scales from 1:15 to 1:1, including the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and the Doge's Palace and St Mark's Square in Venice. They have reproductions of Michelangelo's David and lots of other art work. We liked it a whole lot, strolling around being reminded of many places we've already been, and getting an idea of places we might be going to, such as Ankor Wat -- that reproduction covers about half and acre.