Category Archives: Dad in Law

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.

Dad in Law

About Father-in-law

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Today will be only about my father-in-law. I had so many stories about mother-in-law through which you probably got an idea how “not normal” she is most of the time. FIL however was mostly left out because he likes to be more in the background and basically doesn’t do any (most of the time) crazy things his wife tends to do.

 

FIL3He is now in his mid-fifties and still works in the city’s bureau which is responsible to give shops permission to open etc. There he does not have a simple desk job but drives higher officials from the bureau around when they need it or assigns other drivers for similar tasks. Long before he got this job he was a taxi driver and these days each time we take a taxi he has much to talk with the drivers. Enough about this kind of information let’s go to the more interesting ones. As I mentioned in many other articles he likes to clean. I believe it is partly because he wants to have everything clean but also due to his OCD. This means that he is not simply cleaning everything once a week or every few days, no, he cleans the entire apartment each day and each cleaning his done three times. So each day when he comes home the first thing he does is cleaning for nearly two hours before getting some rest and eats his dinner.

 

However this cleaning is greatly reduced when his wife is not at home, for example when she is on some holiday trip with her friends. Then he cleans much less and I pretty much know why. Because he likes to clean he was also a great asset last summer when my in-laws visited us in Finland as he could help in cleaning and polishing my car! In China my in-laws don’t have an own car because they live right in the city center of Xi’an and can reach everything very easy either by bus or taxi. Whenever they do need a car, FIL just borrows one from his work place for a few days. Even though he does not take as good care with these cars as he does with his own property, he still keeps them in a pretty good outward appearance.

 

FIL2As mention in the other article, he loves table tennis. Usually you would think that he has with his crazy working and cleaning schedule no time to follow his sport but you are wrong. Because his work is most of the time pretty easy he has a lot of free time in which he goes to the sports hall at his work place together with other workers and play table tennis. I guess he plays nearly every day when we are not visiting. Why not when we are visiting? Because in his free time he usually comes to help us out by bringing some boxes of drinks or fruits or goes eating with us for lunch.

From this point on you can also see his very caring and always tries his best to do something nice for his daughter and son-in-law (ME!). Sometimes he is also overdoing it a bit. For example whenever I say I liked this or that drink he will bring next day several packages of these drinks and carries them alone to the apartment (these boxes combined are damn heavy, even for me). It seems also because he always tries his best he also worries a lot. Actually, he worries about everything and this might be also a reason why he started to lose hairs and the few remaining turning grey in his twenties.

 

Now to his other interest: Sweets

Whenever we go to China we bring a lot of chocolate with us. These sugar/ fat bombs are mostly for MIL to give to her many friends but also for FIL. You see, he is a real chocolate destruction machine. I have never seen anybody eating more sweet stuff than him. It appears that his body does not need anything else but chocolate to keep running. Because he likes sweets so much he also brings us some traditional Chinese sweets 点心 each time we are there. I know he means well but most of these sweets are really so dry that I have the feeling of eating dust (but there are some good ones as well!).

As you can see, my father-in-law is a pretty usual guy, nothing compared to his wife. Maybe because he is so normal I prefer having him around rather than noisy and crazy MIL.

FIL1
Shiny car