Last week we visited my old friend from high school. Back then we had one thing in common: Fishes! We both had several aquaria with a multitude of fishes. However contact ended after he changed schools and we didn’t hear about each other for 15 years. Then last year he found me on Facebook (seems like social media can be useful at times) and we started chatting again. Last weekend we decided that we should visit him and his fiancée as they had something very special in their apartment.
Little Degu
You see his love for animals never ended so from fishes he got to spiders, lizards, snakes you name it and his fiancée got a love for degus. So when we visited them their apartment resembled more a zoo shop than a place to live in. With most of their animals they actually do selective breeding and resell them. I do not know how lucrative this is but it at least covers all the costs as some of the more special geckos actually sell for several hundred Euros!
No, I don’t touch that
When we went down their cellar/ super animal room Nathan went all nuts. He just ran in circles, checking out each enclosure and making his high-pitched happy sound. It was really amazing to see how happy he got once we entered this room, I mean he could not even see any animals from his viewpoint but he smelled, heard and somehow sensed them I guess. We tried our luck to take pictures of him touching a snake but he wasn’t up for it. For some reason he was shy when the snake was presented, well too bad…
Meet the pug
Upstairs my friend and his fiance had also few enclosure including one with African pygmy hedgehogs. I don’t have any pictures of them but if you just google them you can make see that those are incredible cute! Basically they have all kinds of animals such as corn snakes, crested geckos, mice, rats, degus, chameleons, tarantulas, turtles, fishes, shrimps and last but not least a pug. Yes a pug, didn’t really fit into their collection but the dog was really fond of Nathan and Nathan was fond of squeezing that poor little thing.
Me?
Crested Gecko
Rats…
Cellar
Cellar
Cellar
Cellar
Do you have also pets or even such less common pets as my friend? Did you ever considered selective breeding them like him?
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Hi all, once again I have a great infographic from Learn Mandarin Now. I remember when I was asked about my top resources and I am glad my feedback was used for this work. I must also add that I am still a defender of the basic vocabulary/ character flash cards hand written (by my wife…)! But I also like to use other means to study as well in order not to get stucked with just one source.
Learning Mandarin Chinese is becoming more and more popular—and can be very rewarding. To help you along your way, we recently asked 50+ bloggers about the top resources they use to Learn Chinese, via our blog Learn Mandarin Now. Amazingly, we received so much feedback that we’ve put together a colourful Infographic of the results—and we’re happy to share this with you today.
But, firstly, thanks to Timo for his contribution and for letting us sharing the Infographic with you in his blog: Crazy Chinese family. If you’d like to know about Timo’s suggestions and get an insight to other tips about learning Chinese from 50+ top bloggers, check out our post: How to learn Chinese: 50 blogger’s top resources.
We hope you enjoy our Infographic and our post, and that they help you learn better Chinese!
What are your methods to study Chinese or any other language?
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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.
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.
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.
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 Family 