I have written all kinds of articles about my Chinese family and how I think that they might be a bit crazy. But how about that they are not crazy but it is actually me who is wrong in the head? It might be I am just delusional and all the crazy stuff they do is pretty normal and I am the oddball.

This idea popped into my head sometime ago and the list of things might indicate that I am perhaps not normal is adding up daily. To spare you from an overwhelming list of nonsense I picked up the biggest indicators of my craziness/ why my in-laws think that I am the crazy one.

Cold Drinks

I drink cold drinks all day long, no matter if its cold outside or so hot that the asphalt on the streets starts melting. When visiting in China and having once again a wrong order in the restaurant turning my meal into some mixture of noodles and lava I need something cold to drink. The usual hot tea served in the restaurant is not doing the trick for me, no matter how much it would help with my “inner fire”上火 according to my in-laws. Cold soft drinks or better yet a nice chilled beer is doing wonders for me. But then there is one hot drink I can’t get enough of, which is another oddity in the eyes of my in-laws and brings me to the next point.

 

Coffee

I need coffee for breakfast, after lunch, before dinner, after dinner and before going to sleep. This might be also due to the fact that I am partly from the country which has by far the highest coffee consumption per capita in the world. However my coffee consumption is down to a bare minimum for me to survive in China as there are just no good places to get coffee. Sure, we have close by a Starbucks but first of all the coffee there is very overpriced and second of all it is the worst coffee I had in my life (my opinion). This pushes me so far that I have to get instant coffee from KFC which still can’t be called coffee but at least it tastes better than in Starbucks and it is a great deal cheaper. Especially creepy it is for my in-laws that I get tired after drinking coffee in the evening and sleep very well afterwards.

Sports

I  do sports, a lot. If it were up to me there is always enough time to do some kind of sports. The need to do some sport every day is so high that I feel disappointed every time I can’t do at least some short exercise. I just need to go running, bicycling, swimming or do random workouts everyday and this again no matter how cold or hot it might be outside. Each time I take my running shoes with me to China and each time they stay packed in the suitcase as my in-laws think that either it is too dangerous to go running or it is too bad for your health. Due to this I am always a pitiful mess looking forwards to the few times we go the open water pool in the city.

 

Sun and getting some color

One of the main reasons I look forward to when going to the open water pool in the city is not only that I can do some swimming but also to get a bit tanned. By no means I mean the leather color many Europeans seem to strive for when going to get baked in the sun but just a bit darker than my usual ghost appearance. As a child I was often so pale that my parents were scared that I have some kind of sickness that we had several appointments with doctors to determine that my facial skin is just a bit “thicker” than usual bringing up an even more pale complexion than others during the dark months. Whenever I am proudly showing some tan lines after swimming my in-laws just shake their heads.

 

Food

I eat too less. I should be able to eat heavy breakfast, then all food placed on my plate during lunch by MIL and then easily shrug of the combined efforts of MIL, her sister and granny of filling up my plate during dinner, but somehow I fail in this. I am not just too thin according to MIL but also according to any other person she knows. It seems elderly females in China not only prefer babys to look like Michelin Man but their son-in-laws as well. Actually I am so pathetic when it comes to eating that I skip breakfast completely and don’t even manage half of the food piled up on my plate.

 

Conclusion

As you can see there are already enough points to show that I am the strange or crazy one in the family. I mean, how much more weird can a person be? Furthermore I am actually so weird that I really do enjoy my daily ice cream, even when we do have -30°C/ -7.6°F. So yes, it seems that all the crazy stories of my in-laws are actually not that crazy but pretty normal.

 

 

Over and out from crazy son-in-law.