Category Archives: Crazy Chinese People

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Dad in Law, Mom in Law

Ikea Madness

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Few days ago I had an adventurous day at Ikea with my family to buy a bedroom wardrobe. This adventure reminded me first of all how crazy shopping at Ikea can be and secondly, how my mother-in-law went into berserk mode at that store last summer.

This is how it should look like
This is how the wardrobe should look like in the end!

Let me tell you first of all about the family adventure to buy that wardrobe. In theory everything was set in stone, we had already figured out which wardrobe we want (PAX System), what extras should be included and how we transport it. How naive I had been to imagine that this would actually work as planned. The trouble started already with the mass of people at Ikea. It was so full that I felt like being back in China, walking through some shopping center except it was not that hot at Ikea and few less Chinese around. The next problem was that we could not just pick out a wardrobe from the examples as they did not fit my wife’s taste so we had to put together every single item of the 3m wardrobe system.

 

The list of the different items for such wardrobe included for example the frame, sliding doors, the different elements of the door, shelves and much more. After roughly one hour of planing this was done and everyone was hungry (except me because I was just dead tired by now) so it was lunch time at the store’s own restaurant. Again it felt eerily similar to a Chinese restaurant by the noise level and amount of people except of course the food itself.

 

WP_20141017_044Lunch was done and the first two hours at Ikea were survived and we walked straight into the next disaster. We had to collect the different parts from the warehouse and as we found the first few pieces we started to realize that we would definitely not be able to take the monstrosity of a wardrobe in our car with us. Not only were these parts just too huge but also too heavy as my father and me together started to sweat carrying them. This meant we had to decide on a delivery option and we ended up renting a little truck to drive our purchased goods home. This is usually not so stressful or related to madness itself however the rental timeframe was only two hours, the store being over 30km away from our home, which meant a lot of speeding and very quick loading and unloading of the truck. In the end we spent six hours with Ikea stuff, including the rental truck story!

 

 

DSC01021Now lets continue with my dear mother-in-law. Back in February I wrote a short version of her berserk shopping style at Ikea. As it was only a brief description of her weird ideas I did not mention much of her craziness. As mentioned in the article she had the idea to take an Ikea kitchen cabinet to China for their own use. Not only was this a very silly idea due to the size and weight of the packed cabinet but this whole kitchen cabinet idea would have ended latest in China as both MIL and FIL have just zero talent at constructing stuff. They surely would have tried to build it up but it would have been anything but a kitchen cabinet in the end! Whenever they have to do such things themselves it either never happens or they hire someone to do it for them as it just does not work for them.

 

The fascinating thing about my crazy Chinese mother-in-law was that she was not really interested in all the furniture offered at Ikea but all the annoying stuff downstairs(for me at least) such as kitchen ware, carpets, textiles and the dreadful area of interior decoration. Can you even imagine how much time a person can spend on trying to convince someone of the great traits of a cappuccino foam maker? Lets just say MIL used up the better part of one hour to convince her daughter to purchase it. Saddest part back then was that MIL did not even like any coffee or related drinks, she just wanted it to show her friends what fancy drinks she can make. But that was back then, by now she has her own coffee machine and couple of nice Finnish coffee packs.

 

Basically MIL and FIL investigated everything there, especially all the small items to give away as gifts to their friends. No matter what they checked out it was just not good enough as every single item had one thing in common: Made in China. No good for my Chinese parents-in-law but good enough for me. After being for several hours there with my in-laws we left the store without having bought anything. They certainly liked the things offered there but all the stuff was not good enough for their friends which resulted later on a chocolate buying mayhem on a cruise ship.

 

Now in the end to show you what Ikea Madness means also for me: 2 1/2 days of constructing the bedroom wardrobe and still not done!

Crazy Chinese People, Dad in Law, Mom in Law

Chinese Sixth Sense

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This is one of the more odd rather than crazy stories. I reckon that everyone had at least once some strange feeling that something bad or good is happening and reacts according to that feeling. This story is about one of these feelings.

Last year, about two months before our trip and Wedding in China, my wife had a bad dream about her father. She woke up with an uncertain feeling, no memories from the dream itself but that it was something bad and had to do with her father. Like the good daughter she is a phone call was done to calm herself down. Well, it did not calm her down as no one answered on her dad’s phone so she called her mother. She picked up immediately and they talked a bit. My wife did not want to ask her mother directly about father so she wanted to see if MIL would act differently than usual. No, her crazy mother behaved same as usual so my better half asked if she could talk to her dad.

 

“He is not here right now”

“Where is he?”

“Outside, somewhere, getting something…from the store.”

 

As you can guess this answer was not really satisfying, it was actually making my wife worry more. Furthermore she heard then a voice in the background and after asking who it is her mother said its fathers good friend who is visiting. My wife knows this man so they talked on the phone for a bit, of course she asked him about worrisome father but he only told her that father will be back soon.

Just as my wife was finally calming down she heard a very strange noise in the background. A noise she knew was not from her parents home but from a hospital.

 

“Mom, where are you? I know that you are not at home, please tell me where father is!”

“Oh, we are outside taking a walk.”

“You just told me before that you are at home, and that sound is from a hospital!”

 

From this point onwards her mother admitted that they were not at home nor outside walking, but in a hospital. So my wife continued asking about her father but her crazy mom would not tell her anything but that he is fine. Then her very crazy mom gave the phone again to the friend of her father and he also tried to calm her down. Everything is fine, no need to worry was the standard thing she heard.

 

After what felt like ages, even to me listening to it all next to my wife, fathers friends finally said what is going on.

“Your father can’t speak right now, they just removed a good tumor from his throat. He needs to rest a bit before you can talk to him.”

 

FIL3
FIL at our Finnish Wedding

Father-in-law always had this big knot at his throat and the doctors decided to remove the tumor as it became uncomfortable and before it would turn “bad”. My wife was very exhausted in the end and few hours later her mother gave the phone to father so he could grunt a few words of comfort to his daughter. FIL was moved to tears how his daughter had been worried about him and promised to tell her next time if something happened.

 

These days FIL is of course still in good health and only a damn huge scar around his throat is a reminder of the surgery.

 

The whole thing makes me wonder about two things. Is there really something like a sixth sense, a feeling that something is happening good or bad? And second of all, why they tried to hide the whole thing from their daughter? This seems to be not that uncommon in China as this story from London Olympics 2012 is proving.

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family

Shopping Frenzy

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It is week three in my old-new hometown and nothing is done yet. Our apartment is still under construction, German bureaucracy is killing us and still no job on the horizon. To take our minds away from all the troubles we decided to go to the Designer Outlet Center in my city for some shopping frenzy.

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This Designer Outlet is a pretty interesting thing as it does not fit into the image of my hometown at all. Neumünster is, lets say, a very boring town with nothing at all to do there. The only good thing so far is the fact that it is located in the middle of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, thus making trips to the nearest cities like Kiel and Hamburg very short. But apparently something big happened in 2012, the Designer Outlet opened and attracts ever since then a huge amount of visitors and tourists from other cities and countries. I had been at this place already before but didn’t pay so much attention to it but now, as we need pretty much everything new in our home, it feels like heaven to have this outlet center here.

 

WP_20140927_014There are not only all kind of brands people desire (at least this is what I heard, I have no clue about clothes and kitchen ware) but there are also few restaurants and Starbucks. Okay, Starbucks I will never enter as I just don’t like the coffee there, but actually seems to be a tourist magnet on its own. The Outlet Center has been build to resemble an old middle European town with each building housing at least one store. I wonder why they chose to create this little town in this certain style but I must say that it looks pretty neat. I believe it takes half day to visit actually each store but I will never try this unlike my wife who seems eager to stay there from morning till evening closing time.

 

WP_20140927_006When we visited my wife asked me why we didn’t go there with her mother during Spring time when she visited for three months. Well, actually she did not remember that she did not want to go to there with her mom because of MIL’s insane shopping frenzy. As I know MIL by now, she would refuse to leave the shopping area and camp there to be the first to enter at opening time. Nobody would be able to drag her away from that place so it was pretty smart by my wife not to mention the existence of the Outlet Center. Yes, I have indeed a crazy Mother-in-law but at least she is not spending (yet) every penny on such stuff.

 

cropIt seems also that the Outlet Center is an attraction for Chinese Tourists.There is even one Chinese tourists organization doing bus trips to Neumünster to go specifically to that one Outlet Center and furthermore two big Chinese restaurants opened in the past two years as well. I can’t say much about the quality of those restaurants as I still have to visit them but there are certainly many Chinese in the Outlet Center.

 

In the end I can say, or actually my wife that it is just great to buy some needed kitchen ware from certain brands so much cheaper than usual. I doubt that I will be there too often in the following years but I bet my wife will be there especially after our apartment is done to purchase all kind of (weird) things.