Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law

The End of the World has come! …again

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I just wrote few weeks ago about the awesome year of 2014. It was really an unbelievable good year even with my mother-in-law staying with us for three months during spring time. Now I hoped that 2015 might be an even better year but no, it won’t be better because for one simple reason: My crazy Chinese mother-in-law is coming AGAIN for three months to stay with us starting April.

 

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What happens with me?

How did it come to this? Currently I am working from early morning till late afternoon and my wife is in the morning in her German language class. Little Nathan is staying in the morning with my parents. Everything seems good and well however this will change in the beginning of May. My parents will go then to Finland to enjoy their cottage by the lake for 4 whole months. So what will happen with Nathancuty?

 

I tried to sign him up for two kindergartens already but he is on the waiting list there, place 270 or something like that. Germany has too few kindergartens resulting that there are huge waiting lists and often also requirements the child has to fulfil in order to get into one. As we were not really fond of leaving Nathan alone for 5 hours a day  (he is already a destructive demon with us there so who knows what he will do without us, unleashed…). The only solution we could come up with was to invite MIL once again to check on Nathan for three months till my wife’s language course is over.

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My fear is that the kitchen will look like the lower one after MIL is done…

 

Right now I am really terrified about the prospect of having her over once again for a quarter year. But it is not about me and how I might handle those three months, it is about all the crazy Chinese things she might do to Nathan, it is about destroying our new apartment and the fear she might cook my new pets. The question I am asking myself and also my wife now is how to prevent any damages to Nathan, apartment and my pets. The only thing we came up so far is to give her some food, a sleeping bag and drop her off at the outlet center but that is not a solution for everyday as she still has to take care of Nathan during the week.

As you can see, hard times are awaiting me and I only have three months to prepare myself mentally for this. I am just hoping that we will figure something out until then. But one thing eased my mind already a lot: Granny won’t be joining MIL for three months. Now that would have been utterly devastating for me. Three months of the combined craziness of MIL and Granny!!

 

Do you have any tips or solutions for my upcoming three month nightmare?

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Crazy Family, Mom in Law

Nothing is safe from my Mother-in-law

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The blog post by Jennifer on A Broad Abroad writing how her dear mother-in-law murdered the microwave inspired me to write about all the things my in-laws have successfully destroyed so far. At first I could only think of a couple of things however as I delved into my memories I came up with more and more sad stories.

I don’t know how my in-laws are doing this but somehow they are able to brake something on a weekly basis. They are not clumsy or something like that (Well, MIL is!) but disaster seems to follow them. FIL is still a novice compared to MIL though even though he has already a destruction value counter going into the few hundred Euros.

The problem in this whole thing is that there are so many little things which broke already that I will just focus on the situations which are basically burned into my memory and only done by MIL.

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My wife surrounded by pure evil: Aunty, Granny and her Mom

 

 

The time MIL broke our toaster. During her three months stay last spring she broke few things. First thing which gave up on us was our beloved toaster. No, the electronic parts didn’t break nor did MIL throw it down. It is a bit more weird than that. The toaster had this function to warm up bread on top of it so when you wanted to use it you had to push a button and a bread holder came up. Whatever MIL did to the toaster it ended up that there was no more warming up function has the button was hanging loosely around and the bread holder was suddenly missing!

 

The time MIL broke the towel holder in the bathroom. We had next to the sink two metal towel holders attached to the wall. They were pretty stable but I noticed when my in-laws were with us two years ago that they became more and more loose. Then when MIL was last year with us suddenly both arms detached themselves from the wall one by one within few days. My guess is that both of my in-laws were using the towel holders to lean on or they were putting some random heavy things on them.

 

The time MIL broke the seatbelt in our new car. Last Spring MIL somehow managed to entangle the seatbelt in the fond of the car where she was always sitting. Later the seatbelt gave up entirely and did not even roll into its normal position after using. Both my wife and I believe that MIL was actually rather happy about it as she hates to use seatbelts. Most of the times she did the “fake” buckling up by just holding the seatbelt around her body so it looked that she was using the belt the proper way…Really wonder why so many Chinese are kind of allergic to safety measurements in daily life and come up with all kinds of ways to not use them.

 

The time  MIL broke a decorative purse from a not so cheap brand. The purse thingy belonged to my wife and she got it from her work. When crazy mother-in-law was with us she tried to open it. Mind you, it was a decorative item, not meant to be used at all due to its delicate structure. As you can guess MIL had suddenly two parts of the purse in her hands and blamed the poor quality.

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Poor dogs have been corrupted already by MIL

 

You know what the best thing about this all is? MIL’s denial! Some time after she stayed with us last year my wife was asking her mother how she felt about breaking so many things. The answer was the standard MIL answer I had heard so often before “Something broke? I didn’t breake anything, ever”…

When my in-laws are alone at home and MIL is breaking something it is usually FILs fault. “Why was this vase standing there, why have you moved it there? No wonder I got against it and it fell down!”, the vase in question had been standing at the same spot for the past few years.

 

P.S. mom-in-law did not break the room from the featured image, at least that I did on my own…

 

Do you have a clumsy person in the family, or even a dear mother-in-law who brings sometimes disaster into the household?

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Crazy Family, Travels

The Time we saw Pandas

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Perhaps you remember from my previous post that we did not see any Pandas in the Qinling Zoological Park in both of our visits. But we actually never went there mainly to see these cute animals as we had the perfect location to see them: Shaanxi Wild Animal Conservation Research Centre

My wife’s godfather invited us to that place back in 2011 when my parents were in China as well. Basically he (the godfather) knows someone who knows somebody who was able to get us access to that place for free as there are usually no visitors except of course some well-paying tour groups. I believe it used to be more like a little zoo before as there were still signs and paths all around that place but in a very poor condition. Furthermore to get there was like a maze as towards the end the mini bus had to drive through very small streets of some village to get into a mountain path in the forest. I guess the village just expanded over the years and swallowed the road leading to this research center.

 

CIMG3123I knew already about this place prior to this visit as my wife had pictures on her Facebook with Pandas before we even started dating. So from her I knew already that there were many Pandas and baby Pandas around at least when she was there. As you know my luck by now there were no cute baby Pandas at this place when we visited. To make it even worse they had only a very limited number of these animals as most were at the Xi’an China International Horticultural Exposition 2011…

 

But we did see a few Pandas but sadly they were already too big that we were not allowed to enter the cage to feed them. Usually this would have been already enough for us but godfather had another surprise for us, the only brown coloured Panda in the world! As you can see now that the world already knows about this animal however back then it was still a secret and thus we were not allowed to take any pictures.

 

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Little fluffy fluff fluff!

Besides the Giant Pandas there were many other animals such as one of the rarest birds in the world the crested ibis or other animals such as the red panda, leopards and the golden monkey. All in all I can say it was a very interesting trip no matter if there were only a few Pandas to be seen as we learned many interesting facts about the rare species in that research center. I can just recommend to visit this place if you ever have the chance.

 

Have you ever seen Pandas close up or other rare animals?

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My crazy Chinese Family I married into…