Category Archives: Dad in Law

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

Going to Stockholm

July 6, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 11 Comments

One of the few trips we did with my in-laws together last summer was to Stockholm, Sweden. My wife’s parents stayed with us four weeks, usually enough to get something decent done however we had in between a wedding to manage which took some resources from us. In the end we only managed to go to my parent’s cottage, Tallinn and Stockholm. The trip to Stockholm was already something my wife had planned before but our ever-changing schedule that summer made it nearly impossible to go anywhere.

Stockholm1 — Our ship (the red one!) in Helsinki

Some Basics

Stockholm is a place nearly every Finn has visited at least once and this has a very simple reason: The ship cruise! The usual way to go from Helsinki to Stockholm is by ship, either leaving from the capital city itself or going further to the west coast to Turku. This cruise is so popular for Finnish people due to the tax-free store, snus and drinks. During the night hours the ship can be divided into two groups. The one group, made up mostly by families and tourists from around the world, tries to get rest for a day of activities in Stockholm and the other group, mainly consisting of the younger generation of Finnish and Swedish people partying and drinking the night away.

Our Trip

Right from the start we got into some trouble due to lack of parking lots at the harbor. This led to a situation in which we nearly missed our ship. Calls by my wife (as I was too unstable already by driving around the different parking lots) to the service line of the ship cruise company solved the issue right in time. These cruises are for most people something fun, they go around, eat in the restaurants, go shopping in the tax-free, sing karaoke or relax in the bar. This cruise was everything but relaxing for us. You see, once MIL discovered the tax-free store we had to go with her there several times to help her around. During that time she was in some kind of shopping frenzy as she was not able to buy any clothes for three weeks already. This resulted in her looking at each clothing item with manic eyes, trying the same pieces on several times even though she knew they wouldn’t fit or didn’t match her taste. This all didn’t matter to her, she needed to buy something! However even after the fifth time going to the store she could not find anything to buy or got convinced by her daughter not to buy this or that useless item.

As you can see, there was not so much relaxing up to this point for us, so what about going to eat? Oh no, we did not go to eat. We actually wanted but each restaurant we went to my in-laws had only one comment “Too expensive”. Well, there went the good food part of the trip as well. Karaoke? Sorry, nothing for me and I had also no interest in going to the bars so we ended up staying the entire trip (except the many visits to the tax-free store) in our cabins.

Last but not least we arrived next morning in Stockholm and experienced our very next disappointment. We took the tourist bus tour around the city but, unlike in Helsinki where the same company is operating, only a few buses had the tour offered in Chinese and we ended up on a bus without it. This meant a lot of translating work for my wife for the entire time and to make matters even worse, our bus broke down towards the end. Slightly annoyed we made our way from the last station towards the city center to grab some food. All the while my in-laws made the often repeated comments of “It is so clean here”, “Such a blue sky”, “How can they keep their windows so clean” and then one comment we hadn’t heard in Finland “So many people here”. Yes, there were many people in the streets and it felt sometimes as busy as in Xi’an but that could be because anything more than 2 people on the street is busy when living in Finland.

Usually it is fairly easy to find a nice place to eat, especially when you are really hungry. But this does not apply with my in-laws around. Usually it is something like this “We don’t want to eat Chinese”, “We want to eat something new”, “This looks so strange”, “Too expensive”, “Too foreign”, “This looks good!” and as you may guess, this last one is a Chinese restaurant…

With filled stomachs we started our journey anew through Stockholm or let’s say, our journey from clothing store to clothing store, MIL viewing each item with ferocious eagerness. Through some unknown magic she was once again not able to buy anything, making her even more crazy than usual. More crazy as we now started to go through all souvenir shops so she just could buy something, at least something little but now again, nothing. To make her mother feel better my wife came up with the idea to buy chocolate on the ship for her friends as a gift. What a terrible idea but more about that later.

Stockholm7 — My last grey memories of Sweden

As I knew already that we would spend the entire cruise back to Helsinki just in our cabins I decided to get my family exhausted by taking the long way back to the ship. This meant also we would be walking through the beautiful old town of Stockholm were the Royal Palace is located. As expected MIL had something weird to ask again “Can we go visit the King, I would like to see him”. No comment.

Thankfully we stopped at a supermarket before the harbor to buy some food for the cruise which included some sweet pastries covered in jam. The biggest and sweetest looking one we had planned for FIL (he has a real sweet tooth) but we would not know the fate of this delicious pastry until the next day. Once again on board the tax-free shop mayhem started and this time focused solely on the chocolates. As promised my wife guided her parents to the chocolate section but little did we know about the plans my in-laws had created during the past hours. We expected perhaps ten to twelve 300g chocolate bars for their friends, oh no, we spent in the end over 100€ on these chocolate bars. Can you guess how damn heavy so much chocolate is? Well, it resulted later on to some trouble when packing for their flight back to China, yes, too much chocolate. Furthermore this chocolate shopping easily took us close to two hours as my in-laws were fighting with each over whose friends would get how much chocolate, how much they would keep for themselves and so on. Let’s just say it was a basic fight over useless things as always.

Conclusion

In the end we managed to arrive in Helsinki unharmed. Carrying our luggage I felt like I could open a chocolate store and have supplies for at least a month. I do believe the trip might have been much more enjoyable without my in-laws, at least we could have done everything on our own pace and actually eat nicely. Oh and remember the pastry for FIL? He threw it away as he thought the jam was meat. D’Oh!

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, Dad in Law, Mom in Law

Eating out with my Chinese Family

May 18, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 24 Comments

Eating out with my Chinese family or mostly with my in-laws is always a very special occasion. Not because it happens so rarely but due to their interesting behavior which includes that mother-in-law is always right and father-in-law is very careful.

There is something like a pattern to the way everything works out. It usually starts when deciding where and what to eat. Of course I get always asked what I would like to eat but somehow plans change and I get for example not my visit to my favorite BBQ place a second time during our stay! (So evil people, oh how I suffer). This is due to one simple reason, we get invited out of nowhere by other people for the evening or next day so my beloved BBQ is on hold until there is a time slot available.

After all this is settled we need to arrive in time which never works out. Somehow we are always late, for example we should be there at 1pm but we just start leaving by 1pm. But here again it has one very simple reason. Mother-in-law is the one who gets to know what time we should be there but tells us that we should leave by 1pm. So when we arrive she says that she thought it was agreed to leave by 1pm and not to arrive by that time! Sounds weird and it certainly is without being able to provide any further information on why this happens every time (my wife is also confused).

The next hurdle begins when sitting down at our table. Here it starts immediately with father-in-law taking all our tableware and clean it with the wipes he took along. These wipes are dry so all what happens is that in case there was any dirt or similar on them he just spreads it evenly out. Next it’s the turn for mother-in-law by putting the chopsticks into the tea to kill the bacteria. That the tea is already on a temperature to drink and thus not that suitable to fight of germs does not matter. Even better, she fills up one cup of tea and “cleans” each other cup by pouring this very tea from cup to cup resulting once again in a very nice spreading of dirt if it ever was somewhere.

eating — Mother-in-law has her tea ready

As I wrote in another article so long time ago the most important step is actually before we sit down. In here I have to observe where exactly mother-in-law or any other aunty or grandma is sitting and from there I have to choose the seat furthest away from them. The importance of this step can be explained in a very simple way: survival! Whenever I sit too close to them my plate just keeps on piling more food and whatever I try, I cannot eat up everything. As I was raised in Europe you usually learn to eat everything on you plate which can be in China very quickly be a death sentence (for your waist).

eating8 — Grandma is very quick to pack up my plate with food

In case there are some leftovers my MIL has always few plastic bags with her or just asks the staff for some food boxes. This might strike you as pretty normal but this food is not for us, nono, it is for the wild cats she feeds in the yard. No matter what food it is or how spicy, she brings it to the cats. These animals are fed so well that they already ignore the occasional mouse sprinting by them but what am I saying, there are of course no mice according to mother-in-law!

After all of this is over the paying starts. When it is just us with the in-laws it does not really matter but as soon as other people are there the battle starts who has to pay. As this is very common in China I won’t go any further detail besides that I have already seen mother-in-law racing one of her friends through a restaurant to see who will be first able to pay…

And now some pictures just to make you a bit hungry