Category Archives: Crazy Euopean People

Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family

Moomin, Moomin and even more Moomin

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What is Moomin you may wonder now but I will come to that in a second. First of all I want to explain how I come to this topic. Few weeks ago my father had a great idea: Lets buy all Moomin Episodes for Nathan!

 

Moomin1For all who do not know about Moomin, it is originally a comic strip and a book series about several characters which resemble white hippos. The author was Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn, who created these stories some when in the 1940’s.

 

By now Moomin is pretty famous in various countries, especially in Finland and Japan! I do not know in how many languages these books and TV series (and movies) have been translated but I believe that the number is not too low as I have seen it on TV in many countries.

 

At first we wanted to buy for Nathan the German translated version of Moomin however we quickly found out that they only translated 50 odd episodes out of the over 100. In the end we purchased from Finland the complete Moomin DVD collection with all episode plus the moomin3Movie. In case you are more familiar with Moomin you probably know that there are several different TV adaptation which have been created over the decades. In this case I am talking about the series from 1990-91, its continuation series and movie. This includes Tanoshii Mūmin Ikka 楽しいムーミン一家 (or just Moomin), Tanoshii Mūmin Ikka: Bōken Nikki 楽しいムーミン一家 冒険日記 (or Delightful Moomin Family: Adventure Diary) and the movie Mūmindani no Suisei ムーミン谷の彗星 (Comet in Moominland). As you can see from the names the TV adaptation is from Japan and it is a Dutch, Finnish and Japanese collaboration. There have been previous animated TV series from Japan in int he 1969 version Mūmin ムーミン (Moomin) no other than Hayao Miyazaki was involved in it as well however he also opposed Tove Janssons viewpoint about the original Moomin which caused that she was not too pleased (actually angry) with this version (actually she was never happy with any adaptation).

 

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2484 Minutes!!

Anyways, I am very happy that we bought this DVD collection as I grew up with Moomin. I still have many episodes recorded on VHS as well as few comic books. I also believe that this show will keep Nathan for a long time occupied as there are over 2440 minutes of material to watch (and if he is not watching I will gladly take over!). In my youth I always wanted to visit the Moomin World in Finland but I never had the chance, perhaps Nathan will be more lucky. Besides just the Moomin World, Comics, Books, Museums and TV adaptations there are tons of other things related to Moomin as well.

 

There are Moomin shops in Finland where you can buy everything you can imagine about those white hippos and the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport was for a time decorated with theirmoomin4 images and Finnair even painted Moomin figures on their Japan-line planes. At home we still got numerous Moomin mugs which you can buy in nearly every store in Finland and those are particularly popular with Japanese tourists. More often than not you see Japanese tourists in Helsinki with Moomin shopping bags filled with little fan articles to bring home for themselves or their family and friends. Yes, I will try to bring Moomin also into Nathan’s world and who knows how many mugs with white hippos he will own later on.

 

 

 

 

 

Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family

Our New Home Part II

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It is done! The apartment is now ready for us. It took us just roughly six months to get a facelift for the whole mess in there. With some small amount proud I show these results as it was real hard to manage it this far.

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The living room with Marimekko curtains (done by my mom)

In April we started the renovation process and in the beginning I still thought it would be just a few weeks of work for us. How naive I have been. It took us already a week to get all the furniture of the previous owner out and another week to literally scrub the dirt from the roof and walls. To add to the horrors of renovating an apartment came the wallpapers, floor, bathroom, kitchen, windows, pipes and in between cleaning, cleaning and cleaning some more. But now we managed it, the DIY Project (okay, 85% done by us the rest by professionals) is finished. Our new home is done and we can move in.

 

Our new home offers us 90m² (968.75 sqf) of living space, which is more than double what we had before in Finland. Finally we have a separated kitchen, an own bedroom and even a room for little Nathan. Luxuries we dreamt of for the past years are now becoming reality.

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Bedroom with the infamous Ikea wardrobe

Right now I don’t even want to enter any hardware store ever again and with luck I don’t have to do so for some time now. Some furniture is still missing such as the dining table and the TV stand as it was broken when delivered yesterday…

 

I won’t show Nathan’s room yet, as it resembles more a storage room rather than a baby room and we still have some great ideas for it which I will post once it is done (It will be great, really great, at least for small children!). Here are some before and after pictures, I am myself still amazed just how much this apartment changed.

 

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.