Tag Archives: Finland

Crazy Family, Dad in Law, Mom in Law, Travels

Travel plans for this year

March 31, 2019 CrazyChineseFamily 18 Comments

Our trip to China is getting closer and with it also the (probably) the last time to see Granny. As I mentioned in the last post she is not doing fine. Back then the doctors couldn’t pinpoint what is exactly going on but by now they figured it out. She has malignant melanoma what they already suspected one month ago. However they could not find the spot untill few weeks later as it is actually located in her upper throat. Because she never really goes to the dentist they never saw it growing there and by now it is just too late.

Granny surrounded my her family at our wedding in China 2013

This cancer won’t be treated except with some Chinese medications as she is too weak for any surgery (and this surgery would be very risky as well) and chemotherapy would not help in this case either. She does not know that she is seriously ill and the doctors and the family decided to keep it that way. In the best possible scenario she still has a few years to live and we hope for that one though I hate to imagine how the last months of her life will be.

Because of this turn of events we “rescheduled” our plans for this trip to China and will stay mostly in Xi’an. Our planned short holiday to Thailand has been postponed to some other year. However this does not mean that we won’t travel at all this year at least within China. In the end of April we will be going for a few days to Wuhan to meet up with some friends from Finland. No they are not Finnish but they are in fact Chinese who studied together with my wife back in Kajaani over 12 years ago and lived in the same dormitory. Last year they visited us in Xi’an and this year we shall visit them in their city. Besides Wuhan we will be going in May to Hong Kong! Now this is a city I wanted to visit for so many years but my wife never really had any interest in it. However now I convinced her finally though I must say that mentioning Disney Land might have helped a bit here.

Standard Chinese apartment block, let’s see how they look in Wuhan and Hong Kong

My wife does not even have the chance to change her mind on these travels as all tickets have been booked already so she won’t be able to turn into a complete coach potato this time around. Oh and also our plans for the summer changed again. My wonderful Chinese mother-in-law will be coming to Germany. We had first planned for FIL to come as ´his wife prefered staying with her mother in China but because doctors think that Granny still has way more than just few months or even several years my wife could convince her. Another big reason to convince MIL to come to Germany was about work. FIL is always handling the packages we send to China such as opening them, checking the items and repacking them to smaller boxes to send to the customer. Every time MIL did this job it was a total disaster as products would just go missing or she would forget to send them/ send them to the wrong customer. Her doing that job for 3 months would be the possible end of our company. Thus MIL will be coming to Germany in order to help us with the kids while my parents are in Finland for the entire summer.

Have you been to Hong Kong or Wuhan?

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Crazy Euopean People, Our cute daughter, Our cute son, Travels

Helsinki, Moominworld and Brahehus

September 2, 2018 CrazyChineseFamily 16 Comments

Now to the second installment of our holidays in Finland. I can’t say really why but even though Helsinki plays such big part of this trip I only have one single pictures from it! It might be because I lived there way too long or took last time enough pictures? No idea. So after one week at my parents cottage we drove to Helsinki to meet up with a lot of friends. With a lot of friends I mean really a lot to visit in just two days. Especially on our second day we had a tough schedule in which we met up with someone every hour from 10am till 6pm.

Only picture from Helsinki at Linnanmäki

But now to the beginning of the Helsinki trip. We were already late as we run into tons of traffic jams on the way which meant that we arrived 2 hours late to Linnanmäki the theme park in Helsinki to meet up with several Chinese friends. With Chinese friends I mean exactly the ones I wrote about meeting in Xi’an so you might guess what all went wrong in just two days. We had in Helsinki a lovely place to stay just 10min by car from the city center. However this meant that we were nearly one hour away from any other place we had to visit, talk about excellent planning again by my wife (just as in Xi’an!).

The second day we were supposed to meet with our Chinese friends at Ikea at 10am and then eat there later lunch. Yes, it did not work out that way. When we left at 9am and were half way to Ikea we got a call that they were just preparing once again beef noodles for breakfast. Yep, we had to reschedule everything, meet with other friends first and then went to Ikea to eat lunch on our own. Much later our friends arrived so we had coffee and cake with them. The rest of our Helsinki time was spent on meeting with other friends, checking on our old apartment and rushing on the third day to get early enough to our next location.

Nathan is not too sure what to think about this

The third day which was day number 10 in Finland we drove to Moominworld. From Helsinki it is a bit less than a three-hour drive as you will get stuck behind slow cars all the time. What to say about Moominworld? It is just a wonderful place for little children and also for adults. The amount of Japanese tourists was rather interesting but then again Moomins are still a big thing in Japan and they just opened/ are about to open a Moomin Theme Park over there. We had perfect (too hot) weather and explored the whole theme park for several hours. Everywhere you can find buildings from the different inhabitants of the Moomin Valley and character are walking around and interact with the visitors. We really enjoyed our time there even though Nathan was not too fond of meeting some of the character, especially Stinky and The Groke.

After Moominworld we drove to Turku Harbour to take our ferry back to Sweden. Well the drive through Sweden was nothing special once again but we had a longer stop at the Brahehus at Lake Vättern. Brahehus is an old ruin of a castle which sits about 270m above sea level. From there you have a stunning view over the countryside and especially over the Lake Vättern. The lake itself is so big that you can’t even see the other side. The entire length around the shore of that lake is around 300km, so it is a pretty big lake. At the castle we enjoyed the view and Nathan tried his best in boulder climbing but his mom and grandma were not so fond of it as it was rather high up there. After that trip we drove once again to my Uncle for a night and then left early morning to the second long drive through Danmark and back to Germany. With this our Finland holidays ended and normal working life got back immediately as we started work the same evening we arrived home.

Nathan with Moominpappa’s hat and walking stick

Have you heard about Moomins before?

Crazy Family

DNA Ancestry and Family Tree

February 11, 2018 CrazyChineseFamily 30 Comments

For many years I did not really care about my family history and didn’t really know much more except my parents birthdays and some information about my grandparents. This changed back in 2015 when a former colleague mentioned something about his family tree research. For some reason I was immediately interested and started my own research. Within short time my family tree had more than 200 (now over 300) people in it but I ran into many problems finding information regarding my father’s side of the family. Reason for this was very simple: World War II happened and the area where he was born belongs now to Poland. Most records had been burned back in the day so we had very little to work with.

Then I read one blog post from Lani called “Identity, what is it good for?” and there she mentioned about a DNA test her brother had taken. Fast forward to the year 2017 where I decided to take a DNA test at FamilyTreeDNA. At first there were problems with sending it to the United States and then somehow I kind of forgot about the whole thing. This year I read yet another blog post about DNA tests by Katie from Hot & Sour Blog and I got into the whole research again. I checked upon my results from the previous year and even found distant relatives living in the USA whose ancestor with the same family name as mine “Glander” migrated from Germany back in the 1870s or so. As I was back into the reseach game I contacted researchers for Info about my father’s family and got few interesting information already and I hope more will follow. Anyhow these DNA tests give you also a approximate Ancestry composition and I was fairly interested how “messed up” my ancestry was.

My Ethnic Makeup according to FamilyTreeDNA

The DNA results from FamilyTreeDNA I uploaded in DNA.land and also on the platform where I am doing my family tree research MyHeritage. All three platforms gave me about the same result regarding my Finnish ancestry between 48% to 49% which is really no surprise at all as I am half Finnish thanks to my mother. The other results vary as for example DNA.Land does not go too much into detail and thus there is for example no “Scandinavian” listed. So according to the other two tests I am for around 32% Scandinavian. No this is certainly nothing I got from my mother as Finnish people are not Scandinavian. I believe that the reason for this is very simple as the area where my father’s ancestors come from is Pomerania and that area belonged to the Swedish Empire for a while.

The rest of the of the my DNA is Baltic/ East European. This I got from a very small percentile from my mother as her ancestors from her mother’s family side are from Ingria an area between Estonia and St. Petersburg. Then the rest of the Baltic Genes are from my father as Pomerania/ Prussia extended to the Baltics. The rest of the tiny Percentages I have in the various tests are <2% Asia Minor according to FamilyTreeDNA, Ashkenazi 3% via DNA.Land and last but not least Melanesian 1% according to MyHeritage.

DNA.Land sadly does not go into too much detail

What do I learn from this? Not really anything new except that I am not Central European at all. To take it further I am genetically not really German at all, at least not central German as the German Empire spread throughout a lot of areas back in the day so it can be said the Prussian’s are not even genetically real Germans to some degree depending on how German people are viewed. For some reason I have the urge to force my wife for a DNA test to see how much she is Han Chinese but I guess I will never be able to convince her to waste money on such a test.

Have you taken a DNA test or are doing some family research?