Category Archives: Mom in Law

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Uncategorized

She is Back!

April 19, 2015 CrazyChineseFamily 48 Comments

Guess who’s back,back again, MIL is back, tell a friend, Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back…

With a little tweaking these lyrics by Eminem are fitting just too well with the current situation. Thursday evening my dear mother-in-law arrived at Hamburg Airport. Actually I could already stop writing at this point as all evils have been already told for an entire week. It is rather strange to have my first blog post after my two weeks absence from blogging only about MIL but it seems like fate.

MILback3 — Why are we waiting here again?

Now she has been with us already for a few days and enough has happened to fill several blog posts. On the day we picked her up from the airport nothing extraordinary happened. No horror messages came from Finland where she had to take her connecting flight to Germany. Actually I had hoped something like last year would repeat itself again but luck doesn’t seem to be my strong point right now. So once we arrived at the arrival hall I could pinpoint MIL immediately even though I saw her only for a few seconds at the luggage claim before the doors closed again. In this moment I realized that these will be very long three months for us!

MIL wouldn’t be MIL without her doing something just plain crazy. Of course she saw us as well few minutes later (she must have senses like a bat) and came running towards us. Yes, she ran out of the luggage claim before getting her luggage. There is a reason why the doors only open from one side so people do not enter the luggage claim who have nothing to do there. After my wife finally got a tiny bit of sense into MIL’s brain this wonderful woman tried to get back into the luggage claim. Of course it didn’t work right in the beginning and only after some other people came out she was able to return. There is always security close by so this won’t happen and then I saw two security guards looking at MIL and then at me. To avoid any more disaster I gave them the “crazy sign” for MIL so they just smiled at me and let her return.

One would think that she learned a bit from this however few minutes later she came sprinting back towards us to cuddle Nathan. This step she repeated several times and in between she talked with other Chinese pointing at us. Thankfully she got her luggage relatively quick so after twenty minutes this endeavour ended and we could start our journey back home together with MIL. Of course she wanted to hold Nathan all the time in the car and not putting him into the safety seat. Somehow she does not understand the purpose of safety seats and seatbelts as it took her over half hour and constant reminding by my wife to buckle up…

What else happened thus far with her? Oh, just minor things but just too many to list them all so I give just a brief overview of the things which stick out the most of the everyday madness. Lets start with MIL trying to give Nathan always nearly boiling water to drink. No matter how often my wife says that this is too hot she just smiles and says it is not hot for her so it is okay for Nathan. Then there is the thing of her somehow not being able to close the windows. Instead of locking them when closing the windows she just close them without locking. Hence every time there is some wind they are pushed open again.

Then there is something else entirely. As soon as she arrived in our apartment she made plans on how to “improve” our living room. Quickly she made plans to move the whole TV set to another position, move the aquarium to another corner etc. What she still did not understand yet is that we need some more people than just us to do so. Part of the TV set is hanging on the wall, it took three men installing this and furthermore once you remove it you will have big holes in the wall. Then there is the aquarium…even though it is not big the total weight amounts to over 200 kg right now, sure lets just push it to the other corner. The list goes on and on but I guess you got the idea.

Not all is bad with my Chinese mother-in-law being here as she is also a great help for my wife now. As we are planing to start a little side business my wife needs to prepare a lot for it and does not really have time to help me with the cleaning or prepare food for us. Here MIL comes in as she does all the cooking now (seems she improved in the past year, thank god!) and actually does more cleaning right now than messing it up again with her oily handprints.

How do you deal with your in-laws? What’s the longest time period you stayed with them?

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Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Uncategorized

She has done it again

March 22, 2015 CrazyChineseFamily 40 Comments

My dear mother-in-law seems to attract chaos. Whatever she is doing something always goes terribly wrong or she has some totally different (ridiculous) expectation on how it should be done. As I have mentioned already too often MIL is coming to stay with us for three months starting in the middle of April. But until today it wasn’t even sure that it would work out.

The problem was all the paperwork for the Visa and of course MIL herself. First of all we needed to get few papers in order to even apply for the Visa. The first was the declaration of obligation from the city hall here in my home town. This declaration basically states that I am inviting my mother-in-law, the reason, the starting date, that we will come up with anything she might do wrong here, that she will return and of course papers from my work place showing that I have the needed financial means to support her stay for those three months. The needed income varies from state to state here in Germany and I also heard it might depend on the person you are speaking to at the town hall, hooray for the great German bureaucracy. This paper was rather easy to get with only a few visits at the town hall but we also needed to get a travel insurance for MIL. This insurance we just ordered online from one of the many Insurance companies in Germany and got it done right away.

Then MIL needed to get certain other certificates from China in order to have all papers ready for the visa. Those papers were the confirmation of relationship between her and my wife, papers proving her monthly retirement money and some other paper I have forgotten. Especially of the paper stating the relationship between her and my wife she needed a verified version and an authorized version (wonder why). But of course here it goes wrong just as expected from my crazy Chinese mother-in-law…she removed the verified paper from the other and sent only one! Yes, she went through all the trouble to take those two papers apart which were even stitched together because she…well even she couldn’t explain, the master of twisting the truth was not able to come up with an excuse. Furthermore she did this whole visa application process already twice before so it was really weird for her to suddenly decide to do things differently. Perhaps there should be a new word in the dictionary for such behavior “Crazy MIL”.

WP_20140927_015 — Guess we will “forget” MIL at the Outlet Center…

She only did realize her mistake after the embassy called her saying that this paper is missing. However it was already too late to resend it. Throughout the past days my wife tried to call several offices in China in order to fix this mess but they all were not able to help. So it was more surprising today to get the message that MIL got her passport back with the valid Visa. Right now I am not so sure whether to be happy or to be sad about my upcoming three-month madness. It seems that Lina from My Hong Kong husband tried her best to aid me in this endeavour as she offered several times to make MIL’s visit impossible but in the end even she failed. The only bad thing in case the Visa application hadn’t worked out is the money wasted…

So as you can see it is not that easy to get a Visa to Europe or to be more specific to Germany but it is actually mostly only annoying paperwork. Usually it is not even that difficult but this depends of course on the background of both the inviter and the person who wants to come to Germany. Now I am really happy that this whole mess is done for now and the next weeks I will prepare myself mentally for the 16th of April, the MIL arrival day. Perhaps I should start Yoga again or something else to find my inner peace.

What are your experiences with Visa procedures?

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

Neumünster Zoo

February 8, 2015 CrazyChineseFamily 24 Comments

Another blog post about a Zoo? Yes, as you can see I really do love to visit those places. This particular Zoo is a pretty small one here in my hometown. During my childhood I have been there very often and in the past years also again several times with my wife and some friends. The best thing about this Zoo is that it is close by, really just 15 min by bicycle or 5 min by car.

It has been found 1951 as a place where only animals from this region were shown. They kept this idea for a long time but later expanded and have now also monkeys, polar bears and penguins. The entire place is located within a part of the local forest which gives you a different feeling for the place than other Zoos which are normaly not so heavily grown into a forest.

NeumünsterZoo1 — The polar bear died few months later due to high age

At least during my childhood the little shoats (baby boars) were able to squeeze below the fence and ran crazily around harassing visitors to give them some food. I don’t know if it still the case as I have been in the Zoo in the past years only during winter time. Another nice thing there is the Barbary macaque enclosure as you can enter it and walk on a path through. Usually all the Barbary apes will come to the path expecting some food or just try to grab anything you have in your hands.

NeumünsterZoo11 — Barbary ape posing with her child

All the pictures are from our visit there in 2010. I believe it was the first time for me there in over 10 years and much had changed such as the new penguin enclosure and the monkey park. As you can see there are goats…many goats, too many goats! The goat world is located next to an old farm building and is very popular with the kids (nearly as popular as the playground). You can enter the enclosure and feed the goats but often you have to watch out that those demon animals don’t get too greedy as they might follow you later on through half of the park (did I mention that they can leave their enclosure?). Now that I think about it there are actually few animals enclosures you can enter and feed the animals with the food bought at the ticket office.

NeumünsterZoo13 — My brothers girlfriends best friend at the Zoo

Even though this is just a small Zoo with very limited funds they still manage to keep everything well maintained unlike the Chinese ones I have been to so far. The animals seem to be taken good care of and nowhere is trash to be found except of course the trash bins. Especially the trash thing however might be more related on the general attitude of the people as in China I even saw some throwing trash and even cigarettes on the animals.

NeumünsterZoo10 — Gaots AND Geese chaising us!

In May few Chinese friends from Finland will come over for a week or so and I had the idea to visit the Zoo with them. During that time also MIL will be still with us so we can just leave her in the goat enclosure as she seems to like it with those animals. Hopefully she will stay there for some time but I still believe dropping her at the Outlet Center for a week is the more effective way to get rid of her for a while.