Tag Archives: crazy Chinese family

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family

First Days in China

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It has been a rather long time since my last blog post and yeah, I’ve been really lazy it seems! But fear no longer as I am back now with some spare time on my hands just for this blog. The main reason for my hiatus was actually our holiday in China which lasted nearly a month and also few exhausting weeks battling with taxations once again. Right now we even have the joy of surviving dear Chinese mother-in-law as she arrived yesterday.

MIL’s dancing group

 

This first blog post after such long break will be rather uneventful as it will be just about the first days in China during our holidays there. Unbelievable but true this trip has been our first real holidays in nearly two years! I guess you can imagine how exhausted you can get with work without any holidays for such long time so we were very excited. However as we are running our own business work did not stop with us going to holidays and thus we had few working days even in China.

Finally good food!

So what you do after such long time without holidays once you arrive in Xi’an? Go eat! The first few days we went to each one of our favorite restaurants, it just felt so good to be able to eat those wonderful dishes again. Well, we loved it but my father was not that fond about Liangpi 凉皮 (cold noodles) and few other dishes we devoured. However we usually found a good compromise and he got something he liked each day, in fact he stated later that this holiday to China was the best of them all as he really liked the food during the entire trip. Besides eating we went for many walks around the neighbourhood and I could not help myself to take few more pictures of the area and building where my in-laws live. My father feels always reminded how Germany looked like after WWII when going through that area in the city center of Xi’an. It appears that standard maintenance is unheard of in parts of China.

Just to the left there you shall find the entrance to my in-laws building

 

The first week in China was more like getting used to having holidays again and doing few sightseeing tours around the city. Even though we had started there our holidays it did not really feel real. Xi’an had changed once again a lot in just two years and just had a different “vibe” compared to before. My father liked this new feeling to the city especially as car drivers suddenly stop for pedestrians (scooter riders will still try to kill you) and that everything is much cleaner now as there are hundreds of people going around each day collecting trash in the city center with a bucket and pick-up tools.

What a boring blog post!

 

 

What was the longest period you went without holidays?

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 Family, Crazy Germans

Keeping the kids busy with sports

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I do not know how other people tackle this so I can only write from our perspective. Even before Nathan and Nathalie were born we were thinking about what hobbies they might have later on and what sports they might be interested in/ being forced to do by us. Might sound a bit harsh but then again all athletes I know who managed to reach certain levels were the ones who were pushed by their parents during their “difficult years”. All others who could choose for themselves quit their sports latest by the age of 15. Now I do not have any ambitions like that as I want to see for now how Nathan will develop and what his interests are as we are trying to give him broader choice of sports compared to ourselves.

Back in the day at the Finnish Nationals (I was second in the 200m freestyle)

My wife did some sports as a kid in form of table tennis for a couple of years and ballet. Both sports she had to quit as her wonderful mom didn’t see any value in sport activities and instead put her into afterschool programs till evening. Ever since I can remember I was swimming in a club. I started when I was around five and continued till my twenties. I clearly remember when I had no motivation anymore around the age of 13-14 as I did not really improve anymore and my father basically dragged me to each training session by driving behind me in his car to make sure that I actually went to the pool. By the age of 15 I got more than enough motivation to continue as I got suddenly better and better and wanted to push myself as far as possible. During my “prime” I had 21 trainings sessions a week of which were 11 times swimming from Monday will Saturday and 10 dryland sessions (gym, running and even yoga). This resulted each day in over 5 hours of sports and this all while still being a high school students going to class from 7am till 3pm.

Nathan has tons of fun thus far

 

Right now our little Nathan is four years old and is doing once a week Taekwondo. He loves it thus far and is asking us several times a week when the next class is. I actually got the idea for Taekwondo due to my best friend who was in the very same club back in the day and did the sport till he reach the first Dan (first black belt level). I also wanted to try out the sport when I was eight years old but somehow did not dare to really join them as I was a very very shy little boy back then who easily got scared by new things. Nathan is completely different and he joined the other kids in an instant. We will also register him at my old swimming club but for that we have to wait till he is six years old (weird regulations here in Germany I must say). It is actually already 100% sure that he will at least do some swimming in the club, afterall we/ I decided on his name due to the very famous Nathan Adrian!

So why am I writing about this? When I was talking with Nathan’s coach she told us that for the past years less and less kids are continuing the sport once they finished elementary school. Usually the kids have multiple sports/ other activities each week and can’t focus on any properly which results that barely any athlete in the club is performing on any higher level, not even reaching the State Championships. The last one who managed it to even European Championship level was their daughter (both parents are coaching at the club and her husband has even 7th Dan!). So growing up with such parents a kid has the best possibilities to reach something in the sport or sadly they might also crumble under the pressure.

He tries his best and it is funny to see his clumsy attempts when doing some kicks

All friends we have with kids do not want their children to do any sports. In their opinion sports are a waste of time and the kids will only get hurt. I on the other hand believe that a sort of competition in young years is useful for the child in order to grow. Here in Germany is even a discussion still going on to remove sports competition from schools as some kids will feel left out and even to remove grades in PE.

Were you doing sports when you were young?

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, Crazy Chinese People, Mom in Law

Your money has vanished

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Finally I found some time again to write a quick blog post. This is actually one I had planned for the last weekend but the whole family was ill thanks to the flu Nathan had brough from kindergarten. Due to this I was more concerned in somehow surviving and taking care of the family (as I was still the healthiest here!).

I do not know why and how but my dear mother-in-law is a constant provider of weird stories to share here. Sometimes I actually think that she is doing this all on purpose but in the end she is just so messed up somehow. Over the years I have shared so many confusing moments about her here in the blog and then I think “It can’t get any worse, she must have reached her limit” and then few days later she comes yet again with another even crazier story. I wrote before that she lives in some “own world” as she bends the truth/ reality to her own liking. She has never done anything wrong and in case something happens it was first of all her husband doing something wrong or some random person on the street!

I shall destroy your mind

This here is now another story about her not doing anything wrong at all as it was all done my another person. When the whole flu thing started for us she contacted us with a very disturbing message:

20.000 RMB (~3200USD) had vanished from our account!

That is certainly no small sum to just vanish from an account so my wife forced her mother to go the bank and get some information.  The bank couldn’t help at all as the only information they had was that the money had been transferred around 1pm and went to some account in Guangzhou. Immediately MIL believed that something went wrong when she wanted to book a hotel room for her friend on her phone. She thought so as she had no clue how to book a room and pay so she just hit random buttons on the app till something somehow happened. However my wife checked upon it and said “No way, your apps are all linked to my Alipay and nothing has been transferred”  and “Why on earth would you try to book a room for your friend??”. Thing is that her friend had no clue herself how to book online so she asked less competent MIL to manage it somehow.

Don’t talk crap about me, I never do anything wrong!

Anyhow by now MIL even went to police station but they couldn’t help her either as it had to be clear that someone else transferred the money and MIL was still sure that she had done something wrong on that booking app. By now my wife suspected even that MIL ended up in some scam as she often used that credit card in small furniture stores for buying stuff for the new apartment. You know the kind of swiping the card and copying all information on it…happened to several of our friends in the past years. Of course MIL denied that and said that she never ever used that card for furniture (though we have proof…).

Why is she so crazy?

Hours passed by with MIL and my wife getting more and more concerned about the money till Uncle called MIL and said that the money had arrived. Wait…what? Oh yes, MIL remembered then that she had transferred 20.000RMB to her brother around 1pm and she was even at the bank to do that transaction but then totally forgot about it. We had 6 hours of pure madness because that crazy woman had forgotten that she went herself to the bank and transferred exactly 20.000RMB. I mean that is so easy to forget right? In the end she blamed FIL for talking to her after her being at the bank and because of that she forgot about it so the only one to blame would be him! (Even though he was at work and didn’t call her the whole day, my wife confirmed that later the same day).

 

No, my dear Chinese mother-in-law has no dementia or anything similar, we had her actually tested. Father-in-law said that she was that way from the beginning ever since he knew her from school. This makes me wonder how she could even graduate back in the day.

Have you ever forgotten something like that or know somebody who tends to forget important things non-stop?

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