Think downtown Napa is changing fast?

Spend a day or two in Beijing or Shanghai.

My wife and I did earlier this year, and it left some indelible impressions, made all the more relevant by the coming of the XXIX Olympiad.

Naturally, in our March visit we did not hang out with President George W. Bush or Bill Gates (see Jeffrey Warren’s photo in Faces and Places). But we did see two cities in wild transition, and in our own way we saw the country warming up for the Olympics.

In Shanghai, dozens of new skyscrapers, maybe hundreds, seem to have grown from the cityscape in no time at all, each with an architectural twist at the top to distinguish it from the rest of the glass-and-concrete forest.

One evening we sat in a revolving restaurant about 90 floors above Shanghai, in a TV tower/tourist attraction called the Oriental Pearl. The neon lights atop the skyscrapers on the other side of the great, grey-green, greasy Huangpu River blinked far below us.

We headed to the observation tower about 120 floors above Shanghai, and found ourselves craning our necks upward to look up at the top of the office tower being constructed a few blocks away — a building frenzy that would humble New York City.

Perhaps the strangest moment in our trip, which was capably arranged by the American Canyon Chamber of Commerce, took place after our group returned to Beijing from a visit to the Great Wall.

Our bus pulled into a complex where we would take in foot massages, then dinner and a show — an unlikely trilogy, but most of us were game after clambering up a section of the wall.

The foot rubs took place in large galleries with 25 or 30 deep, upholstered chairs. Our group took over two rooms, but there were literally a dozen more that were empty, perhaps awaiting the hordes that would arrive for the Olympics.

Afterwards, the performance was strange, even setting aside the showroom bar, where bottles of liquor featured a snake or bat being pickled in the elixir (and where the Great Wall cabernet went for about $20 a bottle).

We were the only ones present for an acrobatic show in a lovely, ornate theater that sat perhaps 400. Our group occupied three circular tables at the foot of the stage. The rest of the space, about the size of the Napa Valley Opera House, was empty.

Except for the young acrobats and tumblers, of course, who outnumbered us. They were very good, leaping through hoops, climbing on top of each other on moving bicycles and contorting in miraculous and beautiful ways.

I don’t think they would have earned a perfect 10 at the Olympics, as a few spinning saucers came off their sticks and hit the floor, and not every one of the very young performers was perfectly polished.

But they still had time to work on their routines, and the empty seats would be filled soon enough. The Olympics were only months away.