X-Tina Takes Shanghai

Recently, the Shanghai Government took the bold move of looking past Christina Aguilera's DIRRRRTY lyrics, and allowed her to bring her 'Back to Basics' tour to Shanghai. There was some concern, as it was less than a year ago a Jay-Z concert scheduled for Shanghai was cancelled once the government figured out what his lyrics actually meant. While not huge fans of the former mouseketeer, a musical performance where we can understand the language is a real treat, so we loaded up our IPods with her newest CD (provided exclusively by our local pirated DVD shop) and bought tickets.

The show did not disappoint. No lip-synching and plenty of cool costume changes, circus performers, elaborate sets, and fantastic dancers. The latter had such an effect on Zach, he's now contemplating how he can parlay his banking career into back-up dancer.....watch out K-Fed...

For all you US Weekly readers out there, we focused heavily on the 'is she or isn't she' expecting question. The post-show consensus was there was no true 'baby bump', just a very unfortunate pair of pants combined with a tight belt that would bunch a bit on even the tiniest of people.

The fans were in rare form, particularly during the ballads, as the Chinese seem to prefer love songs (particularly when they're Karaoke-ing or singing a capella in the streets). A neighboring seat mate seemed to be half asleep during parts of the concert, but at random intervals would perk up and scream 'I Love You Christina' at the top of his lungs. Glow sticks and lit-up devils ears (?) were out in full force, and one lucky fan managed to get her Hello Kitty doll picked up by the star.