Eric Alterman of MSNBC's Altercation has graciously asked us to fill in for him on Tuesday. Of course, we're delighted to do it. We're also flying home from China on Tuesday so this should be no small feat, but we're determined to make the column a worthy one. Since in one hour it will be Tuesday here (13 hours ahead of New York, 16 ahead of California) we're going to forego more posting on TalkLeft until we're back home.

China may be the most service-people friendly country we've ever been in. From the airport pickup which consists of a driver and a hotel staff person waiting at baggage claim to drive us to the hotel in a brand new Audi, to the reception people who showed us three rooms at check-in and gave us our choice, to the staff at the executive lounge who provide three meals a day and cocktails gratis along with big screen tv's tuned to CNN and every important newspaper and magazine we can think of, to the three 20-something year olds who just spent an hour in our room at 10 at night because the hotel's broadband server went down and they wanted to make sure we knew how to get dialup access in the interim--even though they don't speak English and we can't speak a word of Chinese--we are duly impressed.

Shanghai is rolling out every stop to get the 2010 World Expo--the papers here report that all the citizens, from the elderly to the working class to the college kids are in favor of it. It truly is a city of the future and wants badly to compete in every sense with New York, London and Hong Kong. In our book it already does. Business and the economy here are robust and China tends to build things with an eye towards what will be needed ten years from now. The streets are safe and so is the drinking water--parks are filled in the early morning with people doing T'ai Chi--the art museum is world class, Placido Domingo played here last night with two other famous tenors...we're even more impressed with Shanghai than we were last year on our first trip.

Thanks to Lisa English of Ruminate This for spreading the word on our take of the China AIDS epidemic--we have been a big follower of Lisa's since she began Ruminate This--she always has a new take on the topic of the day, and her writing ability is second to none in our opinion.

We'll be back here Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, and don't forget to check out Altercation Tuesday.