The love for Table Tennis

November 23, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 17 Comments

My father-in-law is a pretty normal person if you exclude his cleaning frenzies every single day. He wakes up around 6 in the morning and goes to work from where he returns some when in the late afternoon. In his free time he loves to clean the apartment, play some weird browser games, watching some sports on TV and then its already sleeping time. Basically he is busy the whole day but you are wrong, he squeezes in still his hobby: Table Tennis!

His work is not the busiest you might imagine as it leaves him plenty of time to go eating with us (when we are there), buy some groceries and do sports with his colleagues. Usually he plays every day at least one hour table tennis and this already for years. This resulted that he even participated and won the city political bureau championships.

I always imagined my father-in-law as a not so sporty person because, I don’t know, perhaps because most of my friends are doing sports partly even professionally and you can see from their appearance that they do something, not so much FIL. Of course every sport is different and I am used to swimming and the like which shapes the body a bit different. Anyways, last years summer FIL invited us to join his practice. I was more than eager to join as that holiday in China was more about our wedding and not so much about visiting new interesting places in Xi’an.

As we entered the sports hall several colleagues of FIL greeted us and all of them were playing some matches. FIL was wearing already his sports clothes so he started his warm up and putting on his knee protectors (he is not the youngest anymore). Meanwhile I checked how the others were playing and it looked to me already pretty good but then FIL’s first match started. Lets just say that I could not even follow the ball. Sure, it was no World Championships level but I had never seen anything like it before and I had actually watched once in my youth the Staten Championships in Germany. I don’t know how to describe it other than that the usually so slowly paced FIL transformed into an agile table tennis playing machine.

Already by watching him I started to sweat (might be also because it was too hot in that hall!) but he barely got out of breath in three matches. After he was done he asked me if I wanted to play a quick round of table tennis. The stupid me thought of course that he might be exhausted despite the fact that he was not out of breath and not sweating. I lost, I lost terribly. He made me run non-stop and I barely got any points on him. After 15 min I was lying on the ground, out of breath and created a little lake of sweat around me. How embarrassing but at least it seemed I was able to bond a bit with FIL even though I must have looked like the worst table tennis player in history.

FIL5 — The strawberries seem to pull him down!

Latest from this experience I learned not ever to judge someone by their appearance!

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law

The Good and the Disturbing

November 19, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 25 Comments

Today is the continuation of last weeks article. Back then something good and something bad happened. First of all the good thing was that I got a job and the bad thing was that the stupid Internet technician failed to arrive and thus delaying our moving date.

What else should I write about today other than the internet technician. This nice man finally managed to arrive yesterday to set up our internet connection and with it we should be able to move in Soon™. What we did not think about when it comes to our internet connection is that all around the phone line is not a single power outlet for the wi-fi router! Just who designs such things? Really, something like that is driving me crazy and forces me to do stupid things like drilling a hole into a wall to pull a cable through just to realize when I am nearly through the wall that there is a metal support and the drill won’t go any further…indeed, now we have an ugly hole in the wall which is leading into nowhere.

As you can see I have some mixed feelings when it comes to my families internet luck but yesterday something good happened as well as I signed the job contract. However there is a little issue as every time someone asks me what I do in my job the stabdard answer is ‘I don’t know’. I really have no clue at all what I will do and furthermore the job title is not helping me any further as I am supposedly in the sales management even though I do nothing sales related, crazy & weird world.

WP_20141119_13_53_07_Pro[1] — Off Topic: My wife assembled this little chairs

Missing the Crazy Chinese Family part in the article? Do not fear as my mother-in-law is so gracious in providing once again some odd and disturbing things. The odd part is about our TV. I fulfilled my dream and bought a nice 55″ TV which I got for nearly half price (I just search and search and search some more for products I am interested in until I find a real bargain). It is even not too big for a living room as we have plenty of space with about 3.5m between sofa and TV, it actually appears to be perhaps too small…BUT there is MIL. Of course my wife showed via Weixin/ WeChat our living room and MIL got a glimpse on that TV. ‘Too big’, ‘No good for you‘ and ‘It is too close to your sofa, your eyes will get bad’. Normally those would be reasonable concerns but in this case they are so, how to say it, so MIL. My in-laws have a 65″ TV hanging about 1.50m away from their sofa but that seems fine. Apparently MIL didn’t notice this until her daughter mentioned what monstrosity they have hanging on their own wall. What is MIL’s reaction to this? Of course, its FIL’s fault! Whenever something bad happens or something which might look bad on her it is always her husbands fault, even when he is not anywhere close by or even knows what is going on.

You just want to hear the disturbing thing, I know it. Well the thing is that MIL is kind of threatening us. Okay, not threatening us in a way you might imagine but it is dangerous enough for me. She is probably coming next year again to visit us but she does not want to take her husband with, no no, she wants to take her mother with. Grandma might be a nice old lady but her with MIL combined is an explosive mixture, not to mention when my wife is coming into the battlefield. When those three are together it will be war and that war would be in our new apartment, no thanks. I just have to figure out how to escape this life threatening situation when those two people really do come to Germany to visit us! Perhaps I should just go to China and visit father-in-law, nothing crazy there at least except the cleaning.

p.s. Changed some parts as the TV’s were too huge with 55 and 65 feet. Hope it is correct now :p

Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family

Moomin, Moomin and even more Moomin

November 16, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 20 Comments

What is Moomin you may wonder now but I will come to that in a second. First of all I want to explain how I come to this topic. Few weeks ago my father had a great idea: Lets buy all Moomin Episodes for Nathan!

For all who do not know about Moomin, it is originally a comic strip and a book series about several characters which resemble white hippos. The author was Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn, who created these stories some when in the 1940’s.

By now Moomin is pretty famous in various countries, especially in Finland and Japan! I do not know in how many languages these books and TV series (and movies) have been translated but I believe that the number is not too low as I have seen it on TV in many countries.

At first we wanted to buy for Nathan the German translated version of Moomin however we quickly found out that they only translated 50 odd episodes out of the over 100. In the end we purchased from Finland the complete Moomin DVD collection with all episode plus the Movie. In case you are more familiar with Moomin you probably know that there are several different TV adaptation which have been created over the decades. In this case I am talking about the series from 1990-91, its continuation series and movie. This includes Tanoshii Mūmin Ikka 楽しいムーミン一家 (or just Moomin), Tanoshii Mūmin Ikka: Bōken Nikki 楽しいムーミン一家冒険日記 (or Delightful Moomin Family: Adventure Diary) and the movie Mūmindani no Suisei ムーミン谷の彗星 (Comet in Moominland). As you can see from the names the TV adaptation is from Japan and it is a Dutch, Finnish and Japanese collaboration. There have been previous animated TV series from Japan in int he 1969 version Mūmin ムーミン (Moomin) no other than Hayao Miyazaki was involved in it as well however he also opposed Tove Janssons viewpoint about the original Moomin which caused that she was not too pleased (actually angry) with this version (actually she was never happy with any adaptation).

Anyways, I am very happy that we bought this DVD collection as I grew up with Moomin. I still have many episodes recorded on VHS as well as few comic books. I also believe that this show will keep Nathan for a long time occupied as there are over 2440 minutes of material to watch (and if he is not watching I will gladly take over!). In my youth I always wanted to visit the Moomin World in Finland but I never had the chance, perhaps Nathan will be more lucky. Besides just the Moomin World, Comics, Books, Museums and TV adaptations there are tons of other things related to Moomin as well.

There are Moomin shops in Finland where you can buy everything you can imagine about those white hippos and the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport was for a time decorated with their images and Finnair even painted Moomin figures on their Japan-line planes. At home we still got numerous Moomin mugs which you can buy in nearly every store in Finland and those are particularly popular with Japanese tourists. More often than not you see Japanese tourists in Helsinki with Moomin shopping bags filled with little fan articles to bring home for themselves or their family and friends. Yes, I will try to bring Moomin also into Nathan’s world and who knows how many mugs with white hippos he will own later on.

My crazy Chinese Family I married into…