Category Archives: Crazy Chinese People

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Euopean People, Travels

Visiting Tallinn

June 22, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 18 Comments

Tallinn3 — View on Tallinn from the ship

This week we visited Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. As we are leaving Finland soon behind my wife wanted to travel together with her friends from her very early days in this country. They quickly decided on Tallinn as it just 2 1/2 hours away by ship from Helsinki and furthermore so much more interesting than any Finnish town we know.

We had visited the city before many times however for this trip we wanted a more relaxed atmosphere and decided to stay one night in a hotel. We arrived at Tallinn harbour at around 11am and went straight on towards the Old Town to check in our hotel. This hotel was something special for us as it is a historical building construced in 1437, full of small corridors, an amazing layout and you basically feel like in some old castle.

Tallinn6 — Being pushed around my tourists

The first day we just spent walking around, finding nice restaurants, a cafe to relax and most importantly for us guys, buying drinks and watching the World Cup at night. Even though I had been so often in this city I saw so many more sights I had never seen before. Sadky, due to utter laziness I forgot my camera in the hotel room and could not take any pictures of those (for me new) interesting areas of the old town.

After a not so relaxing night, full of creaking floors, stairs, music and crying babies we started our shopping tour through the new inner city. I believe that this was the best day for the women and the worst day for us guys. I do not remember how many hours we spent in the shopping malls but I do know that one can get very bored sitting in front of a shop and waiting for the better half to come out. Towards the end we still had some drama coming up as we went (thanks to me) to the wrong ship terminal and had to run to the other one, arriving just in time before the gates were closing.

Tallinn2 — Happy people after eating Thai food

Last year we visiting Tallinn together with my in-laws during summer. Besides that they were amazed why everything was so much cheaper than in Finland they also wondered why there were so many old buildings. “In China something as old as this gets torn down and a beautiful new apartment block is constructed!” – You just go to love those apartment complexes in Chinese cities, enhancing together with the smog the overall beauty.

Here are some links for more information:

Tallinn

St. Olav Hotel

Tallinn Historic Centre

P.S. Old buildings are really noisy, you hear each step taken around you due to the old wooden floor, stairs are creaking non-stop, and you wont get any sleep if there is a baby crying next door however it is still worth the experience

Crazy Chinese People, Dad in Law, Mom in Law

My Wife’s Childhood

June 15, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 30 Comments

My wife’s childhood or to be precise: What I actually know of it.

2012-09-28-385 — That round thing would become my wife 25 years later

Roughly 27 years ago my wife was born in the small town known as Xi’an. I write small because this is how my wife described it to me when we started dating over 4 years ago. Back in the day her mother was still a model and her father a taxi driver. Now my lovely mother-in-law is retired so she can go shopping whenever she wants and sleep as much as she wants. Father-in-law is still driving but not a taxi anymore, no, he drives government officials whenever they need to visit some interesting place. Because of this he has a lot of free time in the office and uses it daily for table tennis practice. He actually plays very well, as he managed to win several time the city political bureau championships.

Due to her fathers love for this sport she played in her early years some table tennis until her mother got scared that she wouldn’t manage school well enough anymore and got her out of the training sessions. However because her mother had sometimes some hopes that her daughter could also do some modeling work she got her daughter into ballet to improve her posture. This was also canceled relatively quick by her mother due to before mentioned issue and she also gave up on her daughter ever becoming a model.

According to my wife her father was the generous person and her mother the demon who forced her into all the school work and extra study activities. Because of this they still have sometimes few heavy arguments which are pretty amazing for me because of mother-in-laws impressive ability to form reality/ truth according to how she sees it. For example my wife told me that she had to beg her mother for a very long time until she was willing to purchase a computer (my wife told her that she needs it for studies but actually she used it mostly to hang around forums and play games). MIL remembers it completely different, according to her she was feeling at some point so generous and surprised her daughter with a computer so she could do her studies better! As you can see, quite a different view towards the past.

This blog wouldn’t be called “My Crazy Chinese Family” with just so few weird stories, so I give you some more craziness. As said before, MIL is fairly good in bending the truth to her wishes, accidents never occurred, she never did anything wrong and besides, her daughter managed everything only due to her generosity. To be fair, she is mighty proud of her daughter but still it is sometimes creepy how she sees the world. Few years back we were looking through my wife’s childhood pictures and there was one particular photo of three children sitting on a sofa. MIL looked at it and said she wouldn’t know who those children are but then my wife said that she is one of them resulting that her mother looked at it again without result, she was NOT able to point out her own daughter – Mother of the year!

Her school life had its ups and downs until she graduated. Due to some miracle she was able to convince her mother for a very special thing: Not to do the High Exam in the last year of high school because she had other plans. Instead of doing that exam she studied English, a lot of it to do the IELTS Exam to study in a foreign country. Through this she ended up in Finland and few years later we met, but this is again another story for another time.

I believe it can be said that my wife had a pretty average Chinese city childhood. Days filled with a lot of studies, strict mother, less strict father and nothing really out of the ordinary. Of course there is al lot more to her childhood however I do not remember all the details of other stories she told to write about it. It is actually really amazing what I know of her childhood as it is nearly as much as I remember of my own (I don’t even remember my school time anymore besides that I was not really fond of it and much more!).

P.S. Note the full hairs of my father-in-law in the second picture, he reminds me of some gangster from an old Hong Kong movie

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family

Our Wedding in Finland

May 25, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 34 Comments

In one of the previous articles I wrote about our wedding in China and how I experienced it. Now it is time to present you our wedding in Finland!

Last summer we had first a “little” wedding in China which was pretty much stressful experience but also at the same time very interesting. About three weeks later we had our wedding in Finland which had been planned for nearly a year by my wife. However unlike in China, we had instead of 100 guests only 50 but at least we knew each single person there! Besides it would have exceeded our financial limits to invite anybody more as Finland is not exactly known to be a cheap country.

Our guests included of course both of our parents and much of my family from Finland and Sweden. In addition my brother was flown in with his girlfriend from Germany. The tricky part was to invite our friends as we had only limited capacities which meant we couldn’t just invite everybody we know but had to be very selective. My wife invited some of her friends she knew for years in Finland and also several friends from her work place. I on the other hand invited several dudes from my swimming years in Finland, one guy from my old swimming team in Germany and last but not least my best friend from my youth who extra came from California for this event.

The couple of days prior to the wedding were more than just stressful. The location of the wedding reception had to be prepared, people had to be picked up from the airport and delivered at the hotel and of course my wife and I still had yet to start practicing our wedding dance! The night before the wedding we also met at the hotel with some of the guests to have a DIY dinner consisting of potatoe salad, sausages and jiaozi 饺子. This dinner allowed us also to get some dancing practicedone as my uncle from Sweden used to be a dancer. Not that we practiced alot but at least we learned the basic steps.

Things became even crazier on the wedding day itself. It started very early in the morning, I had to pick up one bridesmaid from Helsinki city center so she could help prepare my wife with hairs, make-up and her dress. My own preparations were a bit less exiting as there is not much to do except to suit up and put the hairs into a less messy state. However there was still much to do at the wedding reception because one of our guests changed plans and would not come, my wife had to invite somebody else and my task was to come up with a new seating arrangement + getting the technic to work for the picture screening. This meant I drove very often between our home and the wedding reception, building up more and more stress as time was running out. I do not know how but in the end we managed to be in time at the church. I believe this included several speeding violations on my behalf.

Already one year before the wedding we were trying to find the perfect church for us and booked it in advance together with the wedding reception in a manor house near our home (they only had two weekends still free for us at that point, one year before!). Thankfully nothing out of the ordinary happened at the church, not even a crying baby! Our pastor was holding the ceremony in Finnish and in English and in the end we received also a bible in those languages from her.

Once we arrived at the wedding reception it was time for some photo shooting, relaxing in the sun and welcoming all the guests before entering the premises. One of my wife’s bridesmaids was the MC doing everything in English, then another bridesmaid was translating everything into Finnish and one of my groomsmen was translating into German and Chinese, hence we had all needed languages covered. Thanks to the MC there was always something going on which resulted that no one was getting bored. She had prepared a full program for that day and it was planned in a way that it allowed much free time between the sections for the guest to get some rest, mingle and pick up few drinks from our car. We had a lot of games, very good food and a wedding dance which was okay for practicing only 15 min before. The celebrations lasted well into the night and in the end we could get our well-deserved rest in the hotel at the manor house. All in all I can say it was a great day, sure it was exhausting but it went very well and thus was a nice experience.

Here are some more pictures from that day. I will still try to find a picture from our invitation cards which we had purchased before from China.