Nose picking and other personal habits...

So I have noticed that nose picking in public is definitely OK here.  Men and women alike engage in this sport of digging for gold whenever the mood strikes them.  The worst is when your taxi driver picks a "Shanghai pollution booger" (as I like to call the black ones) out of his nose and then hands you your change- ewww.  You can observe this behavior pretty much anywhere here- on the street, in restaurants (yep, the servers do it too), elevators, etc.  And since I am on the subject of personal habits, staring at people, picking your teeth, and shouting into your cell phone no matter where you are- all OK here.  Oh, and I would be remiss to mention the Chinese habit of hitting the close door button thirty times the minute you enter the elevator (as if you were the only person in the world), regardless of anyone else trying to get on.  Unfortunately, I kind of like this habit and have adapted it myself.

And I have one other funny story to tell- since I have discovered the joy of taking the bus here, I have almost become addicted- why pay $1.75 for a taxi when you can pay 30cents for the bus?  But I did have my "I am a stupid foreigner" moment this week.  I have always taken the bus in the same direction but as my confidence has grown, I thought I would try a new route.  Mistake.  I didn't know where the bus stopped so I watched as the stop I wanted came and went.  And then, as the next stop approached (already way out of the way of where I wanted to go), I fought my way to the exit doors.  In China, you exit from the middle of the bus and enter from the front.  Well, by the time I got to the middle doors, they had shut.  When I had previously taken the bus in Minneapolis, you could simply touch the handles on the middle doors and they would open but apparently not in China!  So I desperately tried to push the doors open to no avail.  I had to wait and get off at the following stop.  I asked my ayi the next day how to get the doors to open.  She replied that the driver opened them.  "But what if you get to the door and it's already 

shut?"  "Well," she replied, "you have to shout 'Wait a minute, Wait a minute'!".   Oh.  Now I know.  Next time, instead of looking like a clueless foreigner, I'll just look like a foreigner with bad Chinese as I shout out "Deng yixiar!"  That's wait a minute in mandarin!