Tag Archives: crazy Chinese family

Looking back at 2016

January 8, 2017 CrazyChineseFamily 36 Comments

Once again a new year has begun and I am really looking forward to it. This is not only because we are expecting in May a little sibling for Nathan but because the past two years were kind of – meh. For one there was the incredible terrible year of 2015 in which I got ill and then 2016 when recovery started.

Though things got better last year it was a really strange year as well. Not that anything bad happened during that year to us, in fact things were going rather smooth in total especially with our business. I’d say all the negative news during that year were putting everything and everyone a bit down. At points my wife was just too scared to fly as she expected terrorist attacks at the airport and we did not visit the local Christmas Market due to the attack in Berlin in early December. Perhaps also having MIL for three months with us put a dark stain on the year but then again it would have not worked without her here at all with us being busy with our busy business and Nathan not having any spot at the Kindergarten (on the waiting list now for nearly three years…).

Not all was bad about 2016 especially as we were able to do some travelling. I think it was actually the year we travelled the most ever. First we had a lovely trip to Cologne in the end of March together with my parents and shortly thereafter we went together with my father to China for nearly three weeks. There we had also the memorable crazy city tour, an experience I shall never forget and of course the weird countryside experience for the rich. During the summer months we drove to Dresden together with MIL to visit some of my old friends and experience that lovely city with its surroundings. Just one week later we flew to Finland to visit my parent’s cottage and then stayed with some of my wife’s Chinese friends in Helsinki for a few days. I’d say that is pretty impressive when it comes to travelling for such lazy people as us and especially as there was still one more trip in autumn to Prague!

In retrospect it appears that 2016 was actually rather good! It always depends on the perspective in the end. Though 2016 was after all pretty good I do hope for a better 2017 with less madness in this world. With this first post in the new year I also want to start blogging more regularly again, somehow I had always some excuses in the past half-year to skip one or two posts a month. My plan for now is to stick with the basic Sunday posts and hopefully being able to throw here and there some mid-week posts again about food, hobbies or actually some videos I am supposed to have uploaded already a year ago on my channel.

How was your year 2016 and what do you have planned for this year?

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 I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

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Crazy Family, Crazy Germans, Our cute son

Our Christmas 2016

December 26, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 36 Comments

First of all I hope you all had some nice Christmas days whether you celebrated it or not. For us these few days from the 24th till the 26th of December were the first real “holidays” for a very long time. Not really any customers to deal with, no purchasing to do and of course no packing and with it no trouble with MIL.

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This Christmas was also a bit special as it was the first time in years that both my brother and I were at home for the festivities. During the past 10 year it was always either me who was in Finland or my brother being somewhere else in Germany over Christmas. So this year my father had finally both of his sons home again. This also meant that Nathan had some time again to annoy his big Uncle as big uncle is barely ever here due to his work all around Germany. Let’s just say that Nathan surely enjoyed terrorizing big Uncle.

christ2 — We even stole my brother’s Christmas Pyramid (Weihnachtspyramide)!

As for what we did over the past days: eating, nothing but eating. Oh, of course we exchanged gifts in between the eating but that is about all we did. Originally we had planned to go to the Arche Warder on the 25th but as usual the Northern German weather decided to come around with storms and tons of rain. I think this might have been even the greyest and wettest Christmas for me thus far! As you might imagine staying at home for three days and do nothing but eating is not really the healthiest you can do in your life but as my dad would say “You only live once so you have to enjoy all the food while you still can”, what a wise man.

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So here I am still stuffing myself silly with food while checking the calendar with dread as my goal weight for the end of year seems a bit impossible to achieve within the next 5 days (that is if I do not find my own Room of Spirit and Time from Dragonball).

P.S. it is the first time that I use pictures/ videos from Instagram, hope it works.

So what have you done these past days?

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Crazy Chinese People

The Countryside Experience for the Wealthy

December 11, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 31 Comments

Over the years we have been several times to China. Xi’an is the place where we had spent most of our time so I also learned one or two things about the city. One of those things I learned is where you want to have an apartment in case you got a bit more spare money on you. Yes I am talking about the Qujiang New District 曲江新区which was at first only for tourism but evolved quickly into a real district. What makes the place so interesting for people with some money? It looks just great with parks around, a lake and tons of shopping malls growing like mushrooms here and there. Also the apartment blocks are bit more luxurious than the standard ones you find in other city districts as they even have their own parks in the inner yard with ponds and tiny temples.

around8 — Ain’t a bad place to have an apartment at

One friend of my wife had the luck and got one of the apartments there and now my little story starts. That friend is someone my wife knows since Elementary school and was always a bit wealthier than others around. She married a prince charming who studied in the UK and these days they live in the above mentioned area. Now what is so interesting about the younger generation in China who grew up in big cities is that they kind of lost the connection to nature and rural life. Sure it is wonderful to take walks around the parks in that area in Qujiang New District but it is not really a natural landscape. So what do younger people do when they get bored with going around shopping malls, eating in luxury restaurants or buying food in overpriced supermarkets? They leave the city for a few hours to experience the village life, or what they think the real village life is like.

around6 — Nearby the guesthouse, you can see Xi’an in the background

This year we joined them for such trip into the rural depths of Shaanxi. Mind you I don’t complain here as it was a relaxing trip in a nice surrounding with wonderful food. However it is a bit amusing to see how these people think about life in rural areas. So what kind of place we would visit in order to experience village life? Of course a fancy guest house on a mountain slope just outside the city. With fancy guest house I really do mean a fancy guest house. We were eating in guest houses before and none of them got even close to this one. The whole little village was a bit better looking than what I had gotten used to over the years. While driving up the village road I noticed that nearly each building was a guesthouse with nice cars parking outside. Once we reached our guesthouse I was somehow not surprised anymore to see a collection of BMW’s, Mercedes and Audi in the yard.

The building itself was not so different from the normal guest houses you might encounter in China just a bit bigger and very nicely decorated. The main attraction here was their garden which was turned into a small restaurant with big shady trees and a bamboo fence all around to keep unwanted eyes away from the wealthy patrons. There was even an interesting self-made bamboo waterplay going around next to the fence which caught the attention of the playing children. The patrons who were not busy eating or drinking coffee were lounging in the swinging seats or in one of the hammocks. The more adventurous people were even taking short hikes up the mountain till they reached some run down houses and turned back in fear. All this while taking tons of Selfies posing in this village surroundings.

around3 — Latest at this spot most visitors rushed back to their guesthouses

By now you might be wondering why there are not specific pictures of this village, the guesthouse or other things I described. I was not allowed! For one there was some strange tower/ bridge like metal construction with military personnel and I was not allowed to take really any pictures there and the second reason being that some of the patrons were people who do not wish to appear in any kind of photo making it impossible to do anything within the guesthouse. For me it is just so interesting how this all is happening. The friend of my wife and her husband were so amazed by the hammocks and that there were chicken on the street, it just blew my mind. I mean scenes which are for me just normal in China seems to be something the “upper class” has no contact with or idea about. It seems just so surreal that these normal things are something special for them and they even pay for it to see it. I must say that this particular village/ the guesthouses certainly found good way to make money, by simply giving wealthier people a polished version of the countryside life.