Category Archives: Mom in Law

The Arche Warder

September 26, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 15 Comments

Over the past years we have visited a few zoos in China, Finland and in Germany. We visit especially often the local zoo here in my hometown. Not that we are so fascinated by it but it is a nice little family tour and it is for free for us. Yes, for free as I receive each year from my brother a family card for the zoo so we can go whenever we want there and pay no entrance fee. Anyhow this summer we noticed that it would be nice to go to some new place and this is how I found out about the Arche Warder (Ark Warder). For one it is just 15 minutes away from us by car (I really wonder why I never heard about it before!) and it is more than just a normal zoo.

warder17 — Oh no the goats are coming, run for your life!

This zoo is so different as they are specialized on old breeds of livestock which are not used anymore these days and hence are endangered. Some of the animals are even as rare as the Siberian Tiger! Sure it might not be as exciting as other zoos for some people but for us it is a great place, especially with kids. Right when you enter some goats and sheep are coming and waiting to get some attention from the humans. Have you ever patted a sheep? They are sooo fluffy! Also so many animals had still some young ones around, just imagine some piglets running crazily around and making their cute sounds. My wife and Nathan loved particularly one certain baby goat which was so tiny, they tried their best to give it some food but the evil grown ups pushed always in between. Near the entrance is also a wooden cow and you can test your skill in milking it (okay only water coming out but what you expect of a fake cow!!). Lets just say that my wife and my dear mother-in-law did not manage to get any drop out, not even after I explained how to do it properly.

warder8 — The zoo has a wonderful layout with much nature around

I believe that the animals have a rather good life there. Not just because they get fed all the time what they need but because they have also huge enclosures . Arche Warder is aiming at protecting these old livestock breeds by having breeding projects and don’t just present the animals like in normal zoos. The whole atmosphere was very nice as also the staff busy with cleaning and feeding greeted each person passing by. At the pig enclosures they had a funny feature, an information board where you could press a button and they would “imitate” the sound of the certain pig breed. It is incredible how many different breeds there are and how huge some of them can become. It is in general just surprising how many old livestock breeds exists and how they changed during the decades. Also the information you get there from the staff is great, who would have thought that Pekin Ducks are excellent pets who can build up the same kind of bond with humans what usually only dogs achieve.

You can also support the zoo and have your name then engraved in a wooden pole in a designated area visible for any visitor going around. I would love to support them but this has to wait for some later years as we still have some plans going on at the moment. Right now I hope that we can go there this year again together with my parents. Perhaps they are better in milking the cow than MIL…

More Information about Arche Warder you can also find here on their webpage which has even a page in English

When I reach that size I will also just sleep whole day

This one should get its horns checked out…

Welcome to Jurrasic Park, ehm I mean Arche Warder

Have you visited a park/ zoo which is aiming in protecting old livestock breeds?

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Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Our cute son

Three Months Survived

September 6, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 42 Comments

Somehow we managed it yet again, MIL is back in China and thus the three months of terror are over. Over the past years I had a couple of these posts regarding her leaving again and what we/ she learned. This will be pretty much such a blog post again as I am just lazy right now and don’t want to think too much.

Indeed she is leaving but the question is now, has she learned or improved since last year? No, not at all. She is still the same chaotic, messy and crazy person as all the years before. Sure she does promise to change this and that each time but that will never happen. Remember when I wrote all those years back that she was shocked how well people treated their dogs by taking several walks each day with them etc.? Back then she said already “I will do this with my dogs as well!”, as you might guess they are still every single day in their cage to this day. Okay, sometimes she does take a walk with them but I believe it is more to annoy other people as those dogs just poop in front of every entrance they feel like.

milgone2 — I am not a dog but feel insecure with that lady

Now to the things which actually do happen here in our home. I noticed over the years that she in fact loves to use oil when cooking. That is nothing new in Chinese kitchen but she kind of increased the dosage each year. When she was with us in 2014 for three months she needed about every 3-4 weeks a litre of oil for cooking. Last year it increased already to every 2 weeks. Back then my wife already complained that this is just too much oil but she defended herself “your useless father is using much more oil, he needs a litre every weeks when cooking. See I am not as bad as him!” or something along these lines. Yep this year she managed to actually use up every single week one litre of oil! As you can guess the kitchen looks accordingly. We have oil splatter even on the opposite side of the stove and on the roof! It is just insane as every few weeks I had to basically drain the kitchen hood of oil.

Okay okay she was once again a huge help with Nathan and providing us with food (abide it might not have been always eatable). We were especially concerned that Nathancuty might have trouble readjusting to a life without his Chinese grandmother but we worried for nothing. He did not even care when she left him at the airport and did not even say “Nai nai 奶奶” at all since Wednesday. Seems like he is perfectly fine without her. Only trouble now is to get him back on earth after being spoiled non-stop for the past three months.

milgone1 — Yay all packed up and ready to be shipped to China!

I left out one thing now and that is cleaning. The first weeks I really tried hard to keep the apartment and car clean but it was just so futile. It is like trying to stop and oncoming storm by blowing against it. She must have some magical dirt creation tricks as otherwise I can’t explain it. I mob the floor room by room and once I am done to get some rest I realize that the first few rooms are already full of “dark footsteps” like she would be putting ink on her feet or something. Few days before she left we went to a beach and when we went back to the new car my wife told her to carefully clean the shoes. Once we were back home and I wanted to get Nathan from his seat it looked like she had dragged half the beach with her. There was barely any black from the car carpet left, just sand, no kidding. Upon asking she told us that she tried real hard but the sand wouldn’t come off, yeah right she just had those slippers while as my profile boots did not give me any issue. Just thinking about cleaning after her could be an own blog post again so I just stop right now before I remember too much and bring nightmares to myself.

You have anyone you need to clean “after”?

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Crazy Chinese People, Mom in Law, Our cute son, Travels

Holidays in Finland Part II

August 21, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 31 Comments

Here we go now with the second part of our holidays in Finland. Today the blog post will be a bit different, similar to the article Nathan’s World from 2014. We had a great time at grandparents cottage for the first 1 1/2 weeks but it was time to leave and travel to Helsinki for another four days before returning back home.The trip started too early for me, my mom woke me up so early that it was still dark outside! I can’t remember really what all happened but suddenly granny kissed me and said goodbye. Before I could do anything I was in grandpa’s car and we were driving somewhere. As always I fell asleep in the car and woke up in some weird town where we took a bus. Dad mentioned something about “This is so cheap, cheaper for all of us than a single train ticket!”. I don’t know how cheap that is but I was certainly not comfy in that bus. It was soo full of tall people and the bus driver was making weird Finnish jokes over the microphone all the time. At least I was able to sleep a bit more and when I woke up, guess what, yeah another city again. What a strange thing, seems like each time I sleep these days I wake up somewhere else. My parents talked about this strange place called Helsinki, can’t remember that I was ever here before though.

hki9 — There are really many people in this Helsinki

From this strange Helsinki place we went by bus to another strange Espoo place. There some Chinese man waited for us at the bus station and helped my parents to carry some stuff. We all went to an apartment and it was full of people and even a little princess! All the people were talking non-stop so I went to play a bit hide and seek with the little princess, what fun that was. It got even better when daddy finally had the airbed ready for some non-stop jumping action with the princes. This “bum bum 跳跳 (Tiao Tiao)” is soo much fun, can’t understand why my parents looked so annoyed. Anyways at some point I was forced to go to sleep again but at least when I woke up I was still at that great place with the airbed.

After getting some breakfast from Chinese crazy granny we took once agin a bus back to this Helsinki place. My parents surely surprised me when we went to this wonderful theme park called Linnanmäki. Wow it was so much fun there and it seemed my parents didn’t even use any of this strange money thing. Still don’t understand this money, they need it for everything but always complain that they don’t have enough. Crazy Chinese granny was doing stupid stuff again and I nearly had to throw up after being in a ride with her as she was spinning this wheel all the time. Mommy was kind of angry with granny later but it seems that granny didn’t do anything wrong and that it was actually mommy’s fault, I don’t really understand granny sometimes. The food at the theme park was wonderful, so many french fries and ketchup! We should eat there more often. Later daddy went away to meet with uncle Tatu and some other friends and he only returned shortly before I was going to sleep, they must have a lot to talk about.

Next day I woke still up at this place, are we staying here forever? We all went again to strange Helsinki and went to a place full of Moomin stuff! Wow, so many Moomins everywhere but suddenly we left and I didn’t get anything, bad people. A bit later we were at some place eating Chinese food, it just tasted like China, we should come back here more often. Afer this we were in some kind of park and there were so many children. Even the police was there and I think my parents tried to get my arrested as they always wanted to put me on some police motorcycle, good that I fought against it, I am too young for the prison. Daddy called this Lasten Festarit at Töölönlahti, no idea what that is but it was fun. Mommy showed me some kids who were doing kicks and said that I would do this Tae Kwon Do as well soon, looks certainly interesting I just hope they have french fries as well there. There was so much to do together with the little princess, jumping, running, singing, eating lollipops but somehow the old people looked so tired, what a lazy bunch. We left the park and crazy granny pointed out some sea gulls but daddy said that it was actually a swam, don’t know what is true.

We left those nice people and went together with mommy, daddy and crazy granny to some restaurant were other people were waiting for us. Guess what there were two other little princesses and we had so much fun running around, unplugging some lights and having crazy granny running after us all the time. I don’t know when we got back to the airbed place but I woke there up again later. Something was wrong as it was too early again and we took a big car called taxi where we put all our stuff and drove to Helsinki again. There we took this great train and shortly after that we were again at the airport where I had been few times before. Crazy granny was doing crazy things at the security control again, she is just so funny but the security staff didn’t seem to like her funny stuff. Anyways it seemed that the great fun in Finland was over because later we arrived in Hamburg again and took once again a bus, I am getting sick of these buses…