Tag Archives: crazy Chinese mother-in-law

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Uncategorized

She is Back!

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Guess who’s back,back again, MIL is back, tell a friend, Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back…

With a little tweaking these lyrics by Eminem are fitting just too well with the current situation. Thursday evening my dear mother-in-law arrived at Hamburg Airport. Actually I could already stop writing at this point as all evils have been already told for an entire week. It is rather strange to have my first blog post after my two weeks absence from blogging only about MIL but it seems like fate.

 

MILback3
Why are we waiting here again?

Now she has been with us already for a few days and enough has happened to fill several blog posts. On the day we picked her up from the airport nothing extraordinary happened. No horror messages came from Finland where she had to take her connecting flight to Germany. Actually I had hoped something like last year would repeat itself again but luck doesn’t seem to be my strong point right now. So once we arrived at the arrival hall I could pinpoint MIL immediately even though I saw her only for a few seconds at the luggage claim  before the doors closed again. In this moment I realized that these will be very long three months for us!

 

MIL wouldn’t be MIL without her doing something just plain crazy. Of course she saw us as well few minutes later  (she must have senses like a bat) and came running towards us. Yes, she ran out of the luggage claim before getting her luggage. There is a reason why the doors only open from one side so people do not enter the luggage claim who have nothing to do there. After my wife finally got a tiny bit of sense into MIL’s brain this wonderful woman tried to get back into the luggage claim. Of course it didn’t work right in the beginning and only after some other people came out she was able to return. There is always security close by so this won’t happen and then I saw two security guards looking at MIL and then at me. To avoid any more disaster I gave them the “crazy sign” for MIL so they just smiled at me and let her return.

 

MILback2
Do you try to bribe me?

One would think that she learned a bit from this however few minutes later she came sprinting back towards us to cuddle Nathan. This step she repeated several times and in between she talked with other Chinese pointing at us. Thankfully she got her luggage relatively quick so after twenty minutes this endeavour ended and we could start our journey back home together with MIL. Of course she wanted to hold Nathan all the time in the car and not putting him into the safety seat. Somehow she does not understand the purpose of safety seats and seatbelts as it took her over half hour and constant reminding by my wife to buckle up…

 

What else happened thus far with her? Oh, just minor things but just too many to list them all so I give just a brief overview of the things which stick out the most of the everyday madness. Lets start with MIL trying to give Nathan always nearly boiling water to drink. No matter how often my wife says that this is too hot she just smiles and says it is not hot for her so it is okay for Nathan. Then there is the thing of her somehow not being able to close the windows. Instead of locking them when closing the windows she just close them without locking. Hence every time there is some wind they are pushed open again.

 

MILback4
Why I have to sit here?

Then there is something else entirely. As soon as she arrived in our apartment she made plans on how to “improve” our living room. Quickly she made plans to move the whole TV set to another position, move the aquarium to another corner etc. What she still did not understand yet is that we need some more people than just us to do so. Part of the TV set is hanging on the wall, it took three men installing this and furthermore once you remove it you will have big holes in the wall. Then there is the aquarium…even though it is not big the total weight amounts to over 200 kg right now, sure lets just push it to the other corner. The list goes on and on but I guess you got the idea.

 

Not all is bad with my Chinese mother-in-law being here as she is also a great help for my wife now. As we are planing to start a little side business my wife needs to prepare a lot for it and does not really have time to help me with the cleaning or prepare food for us. Here MIL comes in as she does all the cooking now (seems she improved in the past year, thank god!) and actually does more cleaning right now than messing it up again with her oily handprints.

 

How do you deal with your in-laws? What’s the longest time period you stayed with them?

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Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Uncategorized

She has done it again

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My dear mother-in-law seems to attract chaos. Whatever she is doing something always goes terribly wrong or she has some totally different (ridiculous) expectation on how it should be done. As I have mentioned already too often MIL is coming to stay with us for three months starting in the middle of April. But until today it wasn’t even sure that it would work out.

The problem was all the paperwork for the Visa and of course MIL herself. First of all we needed to get few papers in order to even apply for the Visa. The first was the declaration of obligation from the city hall here in my home town. This declaration basically states that I am inviting my mother-in-law, the reason, the starting date, that we will come up with anything she might do wrong here, that she will return and of course papers from my work place showing that I have the needed financial means to support her stay for those three months. The needed income varies from state to state here in Germany and I also heard it might depend on the person you are speaking to at the town hall, hooray for the great German bureaucracy. This paper was rather easy to get with only a few visits at the town hall but we also needed to get a travel insurance for MIL. This insurance we just ordered online from one of the many Insurance companies in Germany and got it done right away.

Mother-in-law and the goats
Mother-in-law and the goats

Then MIL needed to get certain other certificates from China in order to have all papers ready for the visa. Those papers were the confirmation of relationship between her and my wife, papers proving her monthly retirement money and some other paper I have forgotten. Especially of the paper stating the relationship between her and my wife she needed a verified version and an authorized version (wonder why). But of course here it goes wrong just as expected from my crazy Chinese mother-in-law…she removed the verified paper from the other and sent only one! Yes, she went through all the trouble to take those two papers apart which were even stitched together because she…well even she couldn’t explain, the master of twisting the truth was not able to come up with an excuse. Furthermore she did this whole visa application process already twice before so it was really weird for her to suddenly decide to do things differently. Perhaps there should be a new word in the dictionary for such behavior “Crazy MIL”.

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Guess we will “forget” MIL at the Outlet Center…

 

She only did realize her mistake after the embassy called her saying that this paper is missing. However it was already too late to resend it. Throughout the past days my wife tried to call several offices in China in order to fix this mess but they all were not able to help. So it was more surprising today to get the message that MIL got her passport back with the valid Visa. Right now I am not so sure whether to be happy or to be sad about my upcoming three-month madness. It seems that Lina from My Hong Kong husband tried her best to aid me in this endeavour as she offered several times to make MIL’s visit impossible but in the end even she failed. The only bad thing in case the Visa application hadn’t worked out is the money wasted…

So as you can see it is not that easy to get a Visa to Europe or to be more specific to Germany but it is actually mostly only annoying paperwork. Usually it is not even that difficult but this depends of course on the background of both the inviter and the person who wants to come to Germany. Now I am really happy that this whole mess is done for now and the next weeks I will prepare myself mentally for the 16th of April, the MIL arrival day. Perhaps I should start Yoga again or something else to find my inner peace.

 

What are your experiences with Visa procedures?

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Crazy Family, Mom in Law

Nothing is safe from my Mother-in-law

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The blog post by Jennifer on A Broad Abroad writing how her dear mother-in-law murdered the microwave inspired me to write about all the things my in-laws have successfully destroyed so far. At first I could only think of a couple of things however as I delved into my memories I came up with more and more sad stories.

I don’t know how my in-laws are doing this but somehow they are able to brake something on a weekly basis. They are not clumsy or something like that (Well, MIL is!) but disaster seems to follow them. FIL is still a novice compared to MIL though even though he has already a destruction value counter going into the few hundred Euros.

The problem in this whole thing is that there are so many little things which broke already that I will just focus on the situations which are basically burned into my memory and only done by MIL.

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My wife surrounded by pure evil: Aunty, Granny and her Mom

 

 

The time MIL broke our toaster. During her three months stay last spring she broke few things. First thing which gave up on us was our beloved toaster. No, the electronic parts didn’t break nor did MIL throw it down. It is a bit more weird than that. The toaster had this function to warm up bread on top of it so when you wanted to use it you had to push a button and a bread holder came up. Whatever MIL did to the toaster it ended up that there was no more warming up function has the button was hanging loosely around and the bread holder was suddenly missing!

 

The time MIL broke the towel holder in the bathroom. We had next to the sink two metal towel holders attached to the wall. They were pretty stable but I noticed when my in-laws were with us two years ago that they became more and more loose. Then when MIL was last year with us suddenly both arms detached themselves from the wall one by one within few days. My guess is that both of my in-laws were using the towel holders to lean on or they were putting some random heavy things on them.

 

The time MIL broke the seatbelt in our new car. Last Spring MIL somehow managed to entangle the seatbelt in the fond of the car where she was always sitting. Later the seatbelt gave up entirely and did not even roll into its normal position after using. Both my wife and I believe that MIL was actually rather happy about it as she hates to use seatbelts. Most of the times she did the “fake” buckling up by just holding the seatbelt around her body so it looked that she was using the belt the proper way…Really wonder why so many Chinese are kind of allergic to safety measurements in daily life and come up with all kinds of ways to not use them.

 

The time  MIL broke a decorative purse from a not so cheap brand. The purse thingy belonged to my wife and she got it from her work. When crazy mother-in-law was with us she tried to open it. Mind you, it was a decorative item, not meant to be used at all due to its delicate structure. As you can guess MIL had suddenly two parts of the purse in her hands and blamed the poor quality.

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Poor dogs have been corrupted already by MIL

 

You know what the best thing about this all is? MIL’s denial! Some time after she stayed with us last year my wife was asking her mother how she felt about breaking so many things. The answer was the standard MIL answer I had heard so often before “Something broke? I didn’t breake anything, ever”…

When my in-laws are alone at home and MIL is breaking something it is usually FILs fault. “Why was this vase standing there, why have you moved it there? No wonder I got against it and it fell down!”, the vase in question had been standing at the same spot for the past few years.

 

P.S. mom-in-law did not break the room from the featured image, at least that I did on my own…

 

Do you have a clumsy person in the family, or even a dear mother-in-law who brings sometimes disaster into the household?

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