Oh China, you're so weird!

At the grocery store, this is how to buy vegetables:
You choose the vegetables you want to buy. You look around, but there are no bags. They're at the weighing counter.
You go elbow your way to the front of the line to ask for a couple bags. The weighing attendant stops weighing stuff to hand you some bags.
You go back to the veggies, pick through the nastier ones (the bruised apples, the potatoes with shovel marks in them, the wilted cilantro, etc.) to find your delicious selection. Pack all your veggies into bags.

Go stand in line to weigh the vegetables. And by "line," I mean "mass of humanity all crowding around the weigh station." Leave your basket of children over by the carrots, because this is a two-handed operation. Elbow that old man back. Cold shoulder that woman on the left. When someone jumps in front of you, smile and say, "I'm in line," then step right back in front of them. When you get to the front, just throw your vegetables onto the weigh station. When they put the sticker on them and hand them back, instantly throw your next bag on. Any hesitation and there will be another bag of someone else's veggies instead of yours. Try to be patient while the weigher stops to hand other customers bags.
Why don't they just put the bags out so you can help yourself? Yes, indeed. It's the same reason you have to go to the customer service counter to get straws for the yoghurt: if they put them out for your convenience, someone would come along and take ALL of them. Free bags? Why, thank you! Free straws? Great! These will last a lifetime!
Repeat for fruit. There's another weigh station across the produce section.
Oh, and every few weeks, the grocery store rearranges everything-- as in, the vegetable section was all along the wall, but now it's on the other side of the store in the center. And the fruit and vegetable weigh stations used to be on opposite sides of the same pillar, but now they're on other sides of the room. The eggs used to be sold around the back corner, but now they're by the bulk rice and sugar. In case it ever got too easy to find anything.
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A couple weeks ago, it was finally time to sharpen my sewing scissors.  The sewing machine store told me where to go, so I headed over there on a Saturday afternoon. You'll usually see the bike repair stations, shoe repair carts, and stuff like that on street corners, but on Saturdays they apparently take the day off.
Okay... so I went back another day to where they said to go. There were no carts. I looked and looked, but didn't see anyone sharpening knives. It also helps that I didn't know exactly what I was looking for.
I asked one of my Chinese friends where I might find one. "Oh yeah," she told me. "They usually go around people's neighborhoods calling for people's knives. But they wouldn't come around here (in our fancy apartments above a shopping mall). They don't even come into our apartment complex anymore; the guards won't let them in."
Hmmmm.... So I asked my Ayi. "Well, usually they don't have a cart or anything. They just go around calling for knives to be sharpened."
"Oh, like on a bicycle or something?"
"No, just on foot, usually. They have their sharpening stuff slung over their shoulder. We used to have a guy in my neighborhood, but then he got really sick."
Okay, so I didn't even know what I was looking for, and I was way off base anyway.
Long story short, I sent my scissors home with our Ayi, and she brought them back sharpened. Yay!
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This is more random, but still shows that China can be a little weird sometimes.
I can't speak for all of China, or even everyone here. But it seems like most women in Shenyang don't like to lock the stall door when they use a public bathroom. Nor do they like to say anything when you knock on the door. But they still hate it when you push it open on them.
Make up your minds, ladies!
Actually, I read a fascinating book called Chinese Lessons, by John Pomfret. In it, he mentioned how, during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, doors were removed from public restroom stalls to further remove any possibility of privacy.
And it makes sense, now that I think of it, that most people that don't close the doors or don't lock them are about that generation.