In my opinion Julia there are multiple questions that one can ask about any country, be it Western or Asian, that seem to defy answers. For example, I scratch my head daily, over policies of the US that seem unfathomable. And when I am there, I, with eyes wide opened, am sometimes perplexed about the behavior of people who, one would assume, have enough education to provide them with discernment. I think though that your questions are valid ones, and I'll admit to being a little confused about common behavior here also.

As to your first question about disorganized classrooms etc., I think it has a lot to do with the condition of the average person here having not yet learned to "think outside the box." Also, quite a few years ago, someone wrote a book called "The Peter Principle." Maybe you're familiar with it. The basic tenet of the book is that too often in a business environment, and after all most schools in China are profit driven - be they public or private, people rise to the highest level of their incompetence. Restated, this means that in so many cases people end up in positions that are one step higher than what their abilities or levels of education call for. Now, because of the situation of "guanxi" in China, this problem has reached endemic proportions; therefore, problems such as lack of preparedness can be traced back to the leader or leaders of the particular institution wherein the problem exists. But again, because of guanxi, accountability is out of the question.

When I first began teaching in China, for a foreign owned international college, I was informed that teaching critical thinking would be one of the main underlying functions and/or difficulties of my position. How true it is. As for guanxi, it's anybody's guess as to how the resulting problems of corruption and incompetence will be addressed, or how long it will take before it becomes less of an overriding issue.

In a previous post you raised some interesting questions about hygiene. Here again, a lack of education is the real culprit, but then again as I write that it seems like a generalization - I've been in villages where the residents are far more aware about such things than city dwellers. Suffice it to say though, that the government, local and national, should make more of an effort to increase awareness. Something you would have thought necessary in a post-SARS environment.

"WTF is wrong with people?" you ask. Hmmmm, I often ask that question myself. But I seem to ask it wherever I go. There again though, an inability to think beyond the need of the moment. I can see clearly how the woman who hung the fish on your clothesline must have been hung up on the need and not the reality.

The family who moves their furniture outside every day. That's a new one for me. But I would guess that a family member, past or present, got that strange idea into their heads and somehow passed it on, and the action was repeated so often that it became what they believe to be normal behavior.

The dog thing. Wow, I didn't know that there was a dog killing spree going on. I know that several years ago the Beijing government decided that there were too many people following the Western custom of pet ownership without the responsibility that should go with it. Too much dog crap on the streets. An edict was passed and enforced. In two weeks no more dogs. But wherever I go now I see too damn many mongrels and too damn many dog owners that let their dogs crap on the street. And you're right, Rabies is becoming a serious national problem. An interesting sideline to this is that the government has been encouraging people to own cats because of the problem of rats and mice eating too much of the rice crop in the South.

The IV thing? Yes, quite interesting. My take on that is that the charlatan doctors are so driven by the profit available from IV's that they can't resist prescribing it. I've literally laughed in their face when I've encountered this. Pity the poor villagers, new city dwellers, who are constantly fleeced by those they unwittingly trust out of misplaced respect for authority

Well anyway Julia, I appreciate your observations. I think that you, like I, want to make the best of your situation here in China, but sometimes what you observe can only make you shake your head in wonder.