Chinese MIL | Crazy Chinese Family

Everyone was already in a situation where you thought you did something such as paying some bill but in the end you basically forgot to do it. This can be rather annoying at time because you were at first 100% sure you did pay the bill which makes it even more frustrating to see that you were wrong in the end. Let me tell you there is nothing bad about it as it happens more often than not to me, especially when it comes to bringing the trash out (could be also my mind is doing it on purpose because who really likes to bring out the trash…). However this can be also very aggravating when it does happen to a person all the time and thus not only causes delay in doing certain things but also waste your time.

Who could I possibly talk about? My dear mother-in-law of course! I mentioned in various posts before that she is a rather odd person who is always right. No matter how clear it is that she did something wrong she is always able to blame others for it or it never ever happened. The thing is it wasn’t bothering me/ us so much as we didn’t have to depend too much on her most of the times but this changed a bit over time as she also started to visit us each year for three months and so on. Of course it wouldn’t matter at all in case these things were about trivial stuff but it usually always happens when it is about important or urgent matters.

Last time my wife was with Nathan in China she wanted to take some cash with her to Germany. Okay no problem there as she just had to go to bank with her mother (as the money is on her account) and withdraw some Euros. Now the problem wasn’t with getting the money but to find it again before flying to Germany. Few days before my wife and Nathan were about to fly back she started to pack and noticed that the cash vanished. She went to her mother and asked her where it could be. So MIL told that she gave it to her. Okay no trouble there but my wife couldn’t remember this at all so she asked her again. MIL then explained step by step how she gave the money to her when they arrived in the apartment. She even explained how she was giving it and with which hand. But as my wife couldn’t remember this at all MIL was just like “I gave it to you so it is your problem now!”. OKAY…according to my wife this went on for several hours until MIL finally decided to check her closet for something and voilà: THE FREAKING MONEY WAS WITH HER STUFF!!! Basically dear mother-in-law just created her own world once again and made up this story while she actually put the money to her closet and never gave it to my wife.

Tierpark6 — Just for fun, a big fish (according to MIL)

Another example just to show you MIL’s insanity happened few weeks ago. As you might know both my wife and I have a little business (okay mostly my wife as I was just too ill to get anything done so far but things are slowly improving for me). All of our customers are from China so my wife has to send packages there every week. In case people buy some smaller amount my wife waits for a bit and then sends a big package to her parents containing stuff of several customers who had smaller orders. These things then are being put into smaller packages by MIL and then send to the customer. This actually sounds more complicated than it is because my wife strictly separates each of the items which belong to one customer and attached the name and address of this person. So all MIL has to do is to take it out, put it into some smaller packages (in case my wife didn’t put it already into some smaller boxes), attach the address of the buyer and give to some logistic company. Well well there is not really ever anything easy when it comes to MIL.

Few weeks ago my wife sent such a package containing the items of several buyers but there was one item without an adress as the buyer was just moving to a new place. The customer then sent few days later the new address to my wife and there was so far no problem. But the trouble of course started when my wife called her mother and gave the address for this last package. MIL was like “What package? I sent everything already away! There is nothing here!” WHAT??? How is this possible as there was this one package without any address! MIL was 100% sure that she sent this package but she didn’t remember any longer to whom. My wife then spent the whole day trying to figure out where on earth her mother could have sent this box. Late in the evening MIL then contacted my wife “Oh, by the way I found the missing box, it was with my stuff”. Guess how furious my wife was after wasting a whole day trying to track down where the box could be.

In the end father-in-law’s words ring too true “She is just crazy, she lives in a world of her own” and “She is able to bend reality and thus the truth to her own liking, she is never wrong about anything. Just crazy, you know”. This poor man living with her for so many decades, no wonder he developed several OCD’s over the years.

Do you know someone who creates her/ his own reality when it comes to such things?

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During our first visit to China we went together with MIL and my parents to the Tang Paradies in Xi’an. The Tang Paradies is a huge cultural theme park all about the Tang Dynasty located in the Qujiang Resort in Xi’an with the Big Wild Goose Pagoda very nearby.

Mother-in-law invited us for a full day program in this cultural theme park so we left in early morning to avoid too long queues at the ticket stands. However the entrance area was already filled with people and while MIL tried to get us into a group for the group ticket discount my parents and I became famous with a deaf school children group. Thanks to them the time flew by pretty quickly taking all kind of group pictures and writing down our names and where we are from.

First things first. If you plan to visit this park really make sure to have the whole day time as just walking the main path around will take already several hours. I would even go as far as saying you won’t even manage to visit each little interesting corner of the park in one day!

After going through the entrance gate it really felt like entering another place entirely as the city and the noise vanished and the Tang Paradies was all around us. You might imagine it is boring to walk around a park which is about such a topic but really it was really nice to go around and see the different sections of the park. The only thing which was bothering us was the heat but there is nothing else to expect when traveling in China during July!

TangParadies1 — MIL and her best new friend

The Park has many scenic areas with different cultural themes. What made it very enjoyable at least for me was the smell! No bad city smell around as the path has every few meters incense burners to fill the air with a nice fragrance. All around the park you can encounter interesting things such as poetry, song and dance or also the most important thing: Food! Why am I emphasizing this? Well, as mentioned before on that day it was incredibly hot and during midday MIL and my wife got hungry so they got themselves some hot and oily noodle soup. Meanwhile my parents and I were just suffocating by the heat and could only eat some ice cream. Even looking at my wife and MIL eating this warm dish made us sweat even more.

All around the park are places with water. In the middle is a lake in which the main Palace is reflecting like a mirror. There are little rivers near the paths which help to survive the heat at least a bit. You like to see some little fishes? There is a section of the main lake filled with hundreds if not thousands of coloured carp fishes. You can also buy some fish food and feed those greedy monsters which will result that the water appears to be boiling by all the movement the fishes are making. I can’t say what was more amusing for me, those monsters fishes or MIL trying to tease them by throwing very little food at a time into the water and laughing at the same time nearly hysterically.

In the evening there is another very interesting thing, a water movie. It is a movie screened on the water spray created by several fountains. In the end of the movie when people start to leave the park there is still a nice firework display. I am no expert when it comes to fireworks but I think it is a pretty decent one and also worth filming.

I can just recommend visiting this place when you have enough time in Xi’an. It is a wonderful theme park and most importantly it is also clean (at least in 2011) something I often miss in China. But in case you stay till evening time to see the water movie and the fireworks I have to warn you that it will be pretty impossible to get a taxi. There are just too many people trying to get home that there are no taxis or buses free however if you like some risk you can take one of the many “black taxis”. We took one of them and it was surely a crazy car ride back home as the whole vehicle was basically a three-wheeler transformed into a mini bus without any security measurements…

I got the idea to write this post because I found my old camera again with all kind of nice pictures of our first trip to China. So prepare yourself for some more articles about my first trip to China!