Tag Archives: crazy Chinese family

Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Germans

Sunday Shopping and Duck Race

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Today we had one of the few Sunday Shopping days in which the city is opened on a holy Sunday. Last year I actually wrote about this so you can find in this article more information about this stupid situation here in Germany and why there are barely any people around on Sundays. This Sunday was also a bit special as we had the yearly Duck Race in the city once again (here the article about it from 2015), we had some Street Food gathering going on and a Classic Car Meeting as well.

All the ducks shortly before the start

This year we skipped the Duck Race and I only took few pictures before the start. It is not because we have no interest in watching it but we have a little puppy who needs to get out around 3pm each day and that is also the time the race would start. We had surprisingly good weather with a lot of sunshine unlike the entire last week which had only storms for us.  I would love to tell more about the Street Food gathering but we tried to not get too close to it as it would have certainly ruined our wallets and give us some extra pounds. The only part where my wife was getting weak was the stand with Japanese styled Crêpes but thankfully the waiting line was so absurdly long that she gave up on it.

The Japanese stand

For me the highlight was the Classic Car meeting. The local club has several meetings each year but somehow I have never visited one. Always something happened such as holidays, too much rain or simply no energy to leave the apartment. It was really interesting to see cars from the last 70 years gathered here. As we are in Germany there were mostly only German brands such as Opel, Mercedes, BMW, Audi (Auto Union) and so on but there were also few US brands, British and French. My brother always wants to purchase a classic car but in the end it is just too much work to maintain it properly and you need also a safe garage as those cars can be really expensive.

Lovely old Mercedes

This Sunday was finally a day to relax a bit. Funny enough even though we had the Sunday Shopping day we only went around the city to watch all the interesting events rather than going to any shop at all. Tomorrow and the day after we have some big things happening but more about it in next weeks blog post/ some hints on Social Media the next days.

Have you visited a Classic Car meeting?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore there is also my Instagram account in which from time to time some pictures and short videos might pop up.

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.instagram.com/Crazychinesefamily

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Our cute daughter, Our cute son

Strawberries and Raisins

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During our trip in China this year we really just started to see how different many things are. I don’t mean basics such as language, culture or anything like that. It is more the “think big” mentality in so many aspects especially buildings. Let’s take shopping malls as an example. Growing up in Europe I have visited too many shopping malls over the years. I always thought that they are pretty huge but oh boy was I wrong after really visiting multiple ones this time in China. While the shopping malls are big in Europe (the ones I have visited in several countries at least) they still don’t go overboard and usually just offer enough space for the shops and few restaurants, nothing more.

We were not even at the bottom of that side wing of the mall

In China it is a bit different, very much different. Alone the malls we have visited in Xi’an are just not normal in any way. For example there is the one mall with just some kind of glass roof (of course not glass, some other new transparent material which is like 90% lighter than glass or something like that) without any real walls. So you have that nice roof against the rain and the shops and restaurants are located in some smaller buildings beneath it. Now what will protect you in the hottest summer months from melting on the spot when walking around there as there is of course no air condition? Water mist of course! All around the pathways and buildings water mist is being sprayed every five minutes or so to cool down the air. I have seen similar before but that was on a totally different scale compared to this huge shopping center. Besides this very interesting cooling system there are some attractions such as a huge pillar covered in LED panels which sometimes looks like a giant tree or at other times like a crystal. Furthermore there is a gigantic “waterfall” which sprays water in certain rhythm combined with some music every hour or so. It is hard to explain so check out the picture and of course the Instagram post I had back then.

Some kind of musicish, lightish, waterish thingy thing

 

Then there is the nice other mall which has probably more restaurants on one floor compared to my hometown and all its surrounding villages combined. It is just insane to have that many different restaurants in one mall, it took us one hour to actually select one we liked as there were just too many to choose from. Besides that the mall also has a waterfall, okay not one waterfall but several spanning over five or six floors with gold fishes in the ponds in between. Sadly I do not have a picture of that as I was first of all too amazed by it, then I was too hungry to hold the camera and third of all I was scared for my life as thousands of other people were streaming through the passageways in that mall and I tried not be trampled to death.

Exhausted from eating

I do not know why these experiences amazed me so much this time in China. For some reason I experience China each time a bit different or to be more precise I realize or learn something new and different during each visit. I had been in so many malls before in China but those visits never flashed me like this year. Strawberries and raisins anyone? Yes I can change topics in such smooth way but now you will learn what I mean with that headline.

Yay for a the looks of that cake

Our dear Nathalie had her first birthday in China and we had to celebrate it with the whole family. One certain thing had to be at the celebration as well, one thing  we had to walk and wait ages for: the birthday cake. This cake looked so great (and cute) now guess my horror when I took the first bite of that great looking strawberry cake to taste raisins. Yes raisins. Why on earth anybody in this world would add raisins into a strawberry cake? This was officially the worst cake I have ever tried in my life. This is something you give someone you hate, not love! Writing this I got goosebumps again from that horrid memory this cake has caused. Thankfully Nathalie is still too young to  have any memory of this experience but I am still in shock how the whole rest of the family had apparently no problems with that cake and even stated how good it tasted.

Trying to take a group picture with Nathan, impossible…

 

Have you ever tasted something like a strawberry raisin cake?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore there is also my Instagram account in which from time to time some pictures and short videos might pop up.

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.instagram.com/Crazychinesefamily

Chinese Wife, Haruki the Shiba

Our new family member Haruki the Shiba

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Everyone who follows me on social media might have seen that a tiny little puppy popped up in my feeds in the past two weeks. In fact that puppy kept us so busy that this blog post had to wait till now as there was just no time last weekend.

Two weeks ago I went to an official dog breeder together with Nathan to pick up our Shiba Inu puppy Haruki. My wife had no idea about this whole matter the entire time and was pretty shocked. When she saw Nathan carrying a little puppy she thought I had borrowed him from some friend or program. Well it really seems that I kept all my research and reaching out to multiple breeders over the past year a very good secret.

Haruki just a bit over 8 weeks old, right after we got him

Back in Finland we were playing already with the idea of getting a dog. My wife always wanted some small dog breed like Pomeranian while I prefered a Samoyed. As you might see (in case you have some ideas about dog breeds) that both of them are in fact Spitz. However we gave up on the idea as our apartment in Finland was just too small and we planned on moving to Germany. Then in 2014 just a month before moving away from Finland a friend of us visited us with her new Shiba Inu puppy Tsuki. It was that first meeting with a Shiba that got me hooked.

The little fox

During the first few years here in Germany I put the idea of getting a dog aside as many things happened with my work, getting sick, starting our own business and the birth of Nathalie. But then last year just few months after Nathalie was born the first one of our little bunnies passed away. It was then that I started researching about Shiba Inus again and reaching out to Shiba breeders in Germany. Let me tell you that it is so hard to even reserve a Shiba puppy as there are only few breeders in Germany and most of them are in South Germany while we live in the very North. To make matters worse these dogs usually give birth to only 2-3 puppies.

Haruki now with already over ten weeks old, what a sad looking little fellow

During this summer when we were still in Finland (and met once again with Tsuki the Shiba from our friend of which I posted also on Instagram) I finally found per chance a Shiba breeder just 1 1/2 hours away from our hometown and they just got three little healthy puppies. I immediately contacted them and set up a meeting to check out the puppies. As my wife was not allowed to know at all about this I had to make up some excuses to drive 150km away so I told her that I was going to check out some cars with my brother as he was actually even searching for a new one back then (and he is still…). My wife believed it without any questions and thus I met the three-week old puppies and reserved Haruki immediately.

You give me food now or what?

Now fast forward to the 1st of September I told my wife that I would be going to some meeting from Kindergarten with Nathan and once again she believed me. She was not even questioning me when I took the car even though the Kindergarten is just 200m away from our building. I also posted a picture on Instagram of Haruki on Instagram when I picked him up. And then we arrived back home with a puppy and she did not believe me at all, only after I told her to contact our friend in Finland who has a Shiba and ask her, she slowly started to realize that our family got another baby.

Sleeping is great

Our little Haruki kept as rather busy thus far but it got better and better the past days. By now I don’t even need to get up in the middle of the night to let him out and he sleeps till we get up. In fact he spends most of the day sleeping, cleaning himself like a cat, playing for a short time, eating and making cat-like sounds rather than barking. No this is not unusual for Shiba’s as they are a bit different from many dog breeds. I heard from other people that their dogs are so lazy that they fall asleep while taking a walk!

Do you have a dog or are planning for one?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore there is also my Instagram account in which from time to time some pictures and short videos might pop up.