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Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Germans, Our cute son, Uncategorized

The Big Medieval Market

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Just few weeks ago I wrote about the Medieval Market/ Renaissance Fair here at my hometown. I also mentioned that we would be going to a much bigger Market this months and today was the day for the journey. The whole event is called “MitterlalterlicherPhantasie Spectaculum” and is the biggest traveling cultural festival in the world. Nearly every weekend during the warmer months it is in another city with over 2500 people and over 1000 tents to bring the Medieval World back to our time.  The closest location of this traveling market is in another city roughly 45 min by car away from us. Last time I had been there was 10 years ago!

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Blacksmith with family and apprentice

 

First of all it seems that the whole town needs to participate somehow as there are just so many visitors coming. As most towns here are in the middle of farm land they just rent some fields and use them as parking lots. Through this all visitors can find some parking space BUT it results in a long journey to the festival grounds at the park in the middle of the town. Last time I was there the ticket price was around 10-15 Euros or so and it got a rather huge increase as it is now 30 Euros per person, eeeek nearly 100 Euros for us! But we both think it was worth it as it was a really special day.

So whats the difference to the free entrance market in my hometown last month? For starters it is so much bigger with multiple actors and bands performing the entire day. Then there are so many workshops you can participate such as pottery, blacksmithing and there are real knight battles (with jousting etc) on the field next to the park, many gleemen, random activities happening and tons of stuff to buy. The place was just full with people and many dressed up accordingly. When my wife saw how others were in chainmail or in beautiful dresses she decided for us that we will do the same for the Market in October.

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Nathan being shy posing with the Knights

 

Though I said last time that we will try to find something nice for Nathan we failed to get him any clothes as he is just too small right now so he had to settle for a mini wooden sword. As he is a fast learner he mastered the skill of one-handed sword fighting within a couple of hours and attacked (unsuccessfully) a dark knight. After that he decided that sword fighting is not his strong point and abandoned the sword for the rest of the day. All in all I can say that this was a really great day even though my current health situation was making everything a bit harder to get around.

 

Would you like to visit such renaissance fair?

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

She is Back!

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Do you try to bribe me?

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.

 

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Why I have to sit here?

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

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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.

Mother-in-law and the goats
Mother-in-law and the goats

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”.

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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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