Category Archives: Crazy Family

A Day at the Beach

Last week I announced that I would be getting more active with blogging again and I kind of regret it already. No not that I hate blogging but I discovered that I have too much material to work with. Yes, you can actually have too much. For one my dear beloved Chinese mother-in-law is giving nearly daily new material to write about. However she is just the tip of the iceberg as I have “postponed” so many other things over the past two years. Only the small trips and craziness in China is already overwhelming me! So this post is about one of our little tours from last summer when MIL was still with us in Germany.

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So much sand

What image do you have when you think about a beach? I’d say it is with clear blue water and white sand. All over the world the beaches are different as I especially noticed when we had our holiday in Rhodes where the beach was a stony hell with each step without shoes was pure torment. Last summer we went to a beach nearby my hometown, to Sankt Peter-Ording.  It is a very popular seaside spa (they have their own sulphur spring!) and is a municipality of the district Nordfriesland in my home state Schleswig-Holstein.  That beach is a bit different from any I have ever visited before as you can see in the pictures. This is because it is a Intertidal Zone, the entire North Sea coast of Germany is called Wadden Sea (including part of the Netherlands and Danmark). Twice a day the ocean decides that it fun to retreat and you can do some great mudflat hiking.

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Yep, you can swim there

Anyhow the beach at Sankt Peter-Ording is also easy to reach by car as it has Germany’s only beach parking lot. So you just drive there and park you car at the beach. When we were at the beach there was currently the low tide which meant that we had to walk still for 20 min till we reached the ocean.  MIL and my wife were amazed as they had never seen something like that nor imagined. Nathan was another story though as he was so afraid of getting his feet dirty in the mud (yes he is one picky little fellow). He also didn’t really trust the shallow waters which were filled with shrimps and crabs. The entire time he wanted to be carried except of course when we wanted to leave. Suddenly he wanted to play around and not leave anymore, what should I say – kids.

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A pile of…I don’t know

Though we were only there for one hour we had a great time. There is just so much fun you can have, especially with kids, as there are small animals everywhere. I still remember how I “hunted” down a crab the size of a golf ball and proudly presented it to my wife. It took a lot of effort and pain and in that moment a small boy passed by showing off his crabzilla. That beast was nearly as big as a dining plate! I wonder if he still has all his fingers…

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That all is usually covered by water

Besides hunting down crabs I also tried to catch some shrimps but that was a bit harder even though there were thousands of them in the shallow waters. In the end I decided against catching any more crabs or shrimps and set them all free because I was fearing that MIL was making some sudden dinner plans involving those poor little creatures. As you might remember from this blog post I was not too happy once we got home as MIL somehow had managed to drag in half the beach in the car. That was some serious vacuum cleaning the next day I tell you that.

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Some of the stilt houses

In case you ever have a trip to Germany and are for some weird reason in the North I recommend to check out the Wadden Sea. It is just incredible what Nature is doing and to see with you own eyes how the water retreats beyond eyesight. Where to witness that spectacle is all up to you as it is magical at any spot at the Wadden Sea.

What interesting beaches have you visited?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.youtube.com/

 

Looking back at 2016

Once again a new year has begun and I am really looking forward to it. This is not only because we are expecting in May a little sibling for Nathan but because the past two years were kind of – meh. For one there was the incredible terrible year of 2015 in which I got ill and then 2016 when recovery started.

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I deem this year unworthy

Though things got better last year it was a really strange year as well. Not that anything bad happened during that year to us, in fact things were going rather smooth in total especially with our business. I’d say all the negative news during that year were putting everything and everyone a bit down. At points my wife was just too scared to fly as she expected terrorist attacks at the airport and we did not visit the local Christmas Market due to the attack in Berlin in early December. Perhaps also having MIL for three months with us put a dark stain on the year but then again it would have not worked without her here at all with us being busy with our busy business and Nathan not having any spot at the Kindergarten (on the waiting list now for nearly three years…).

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I have a bucket

Not all was bad about 2016 especially as we were able to do some travelling. I think it was actually the year we travelled the most ever. First we had a lovely trip to Cologne in the end of March together with my parents and shortly thereafter we went together with my father to China for nearly three weeks. There we had also the memorable crazy city tour, an experience I shall never forget and of course the weird countryside experience for the rich. During the summer months we drove to Dresden together with MIL to visit some of my old friends and experience that lovely city with its surroundings. Just one week later we flew to Finland to visit my parent’s cottage and then stayed with some of my wife’s Chinese friends in Helsinki for a few days. I’d say that is pretty impressive when it comes to travelling for such lazy people as us and especially as there was still one more trip in autumn to Prague!

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Busy Nanjing Lu in Shanghai

In retrospect it appears that 2016 was actually rather good! It always depends on the perspective in the end. Though 2016 was after all pretty good I do hope for a better 2017 with less madness in this world. With this first post in the new year I also want to start blogging more regularly again, somehow I had always some excuses in the past half-year to skip one or two posts a month. My plan for now is to stick with the basic Sunday posts and hopefully being able to throw here and there some mid-week posts again about food, hobbies or actually some videos I am supposed to have uploaded already a year ago on my channel.

How was your year 2016 and what do you have planned for this year?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.youtube.com/

Our Christmas 2016

First of all I hope you all had some nice Christmas days whether you celebrated it or not. For us these few days from the 24th till the 26th of December were the first real “holidays” for a very long time. Not really any customers to deal with, no purchasing to do and of course no packing and with it no trouble with MIL.

 

This Christmas was also a bit special as it was the first time in years that both my brother and I were at home for the festivities. During the past 10 year it was always either me who was in Finland or my brother being somewhere else in Germany over Christmas. So this year my father had finally both of his sons home again. This also meant that Nathan had some time again to annoy his big Uncle as big uncle is barely ever here due to his work all around Germany. Let’s just say that Nathan surely enjoyed terrorizing big Uncle.

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We even stole my brother’s Christmas Pyramid (Weihnachtspyramide)!

As for what we did over the past days: eating, nothing but eating. Oh, of course we exchanged gifts in between the eating but that is about all we did. Originally we had planned to go to the Arche Warder on the 25th but as usual the Northern German weather decided to come around with storms and tons of rain. I think this might have been even the greyest and wettest Christmas for me thus far! As you might imagine staying at home for three days and do nothing but eating is not really the healthiest you can do in your life but as my dad would say “You only live once so you have to enjoy all the food while you still can”, what a wise man.

 

So here I am still stuffing myself silly with food while checking the calendar with dread as my goal weight for the end of year seems a bit impossible to achieve within the next 5 days (that is if I do not find my own Room of Spirit and Time from Dragonball).

P.S. it is the first time that I use pictures/ videos from Instagram, hope it works.

So what have you done these past days?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.youtube.com/