Tag Archives: holidays in Finland

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Haruki the Shiba, Me, Our cute daughter, Our cute son

The kind of Mixed 2018 Review

December 16, 2018 CrazyChineseFamily 19 Comments

For the past years I have been not doing really many of such reviews. One I clearly remember was the Amazing Year 2014 Review as it was really a wonderful year full of great memories. The past years on the other hand have been more like “meh” compared to 2014. Now 2018 is something totally different as it will be definitely a year I will remember for a very long time due to its ups and downs.

The year started kind of slow and I thought back about the past years living in Germany and how it changed since we moved here. Besides that I also had another part of the “New Apartment” series which is still not entirely solved thus far. One big thing I had going on was my family research combined with a DNA test to find somehow some relatives somewhere on this globe. I am still in this whole research but have once again hit too many brick walls and for now I just wait for some lucky discoveries when someone adds to their family tree at some point.

In March things changed a bit as we arranged our trip to China and also had finally the confirmation that we could travel to Japan in May! Though we were excited to go once again to China and enjoy the good food there and kind of experience the strange Chinese family with their weird requests the main thing for us was Japan. For so many years we wanted to travel to Japan but it never worked out. Either it was the Japanese Embassy in Finland telling us the wrong information regarding the visa for my wife or we simply had suddenly no time for it. My wife planned the entire week in Japan for nearly two months to make it as perfect as possible for us and especially for Nathan. I don’t know why but I have barely any memories about April even though we wouldn’t fly to China till near the end of the month. Guess we were just busy with work, keeping Nathan busy with sports and being way too excited about our holidays.

May was the most amazing month for us in years as we were in China and of course in Japan. Blogging wise I didn’t do anything and wrote all about the wonder of Japan in June. Tokyo and Osaka were just so wonderful and Nathan really enjoyed the few hours we had at Thomas Land. Each day in Japan we had a blast and thinking back I still can’t believe that we actually experienced all of that. I must say that all the planning my wife did for this holiday surely paid off. Usually all her preparing and planning are totally messed up as I wrote later in summer after our two-week holidays in Finland. The time in Finland was way too short but we did go to Moominland which had been on my bucket list ever since I was a child!

With Autumn approaching we got a new family member, Haruki the Shiba. That tiny dog gave us so much joy thus far and by now he tripled his weight and can fart like a champ. In fact whenever he does release some gasses he cannot take the smell either and runs to another room. He is a strange little fellow with his constant smiley face. Ever since we got him I only started to see how many dogs we have in the neighbourhood. Even now I still encounter “new dogs” with their owners living somewhere nearby and I’ve been doing the rounds with Haruki for four months now. Besides Haruki we had another last highlight and that was visiting Lego Land in Denmark. We didn’t plan to go there this year but after finding some ridiculous good deal we just had to go. Two days of rain but also two days filled with Lego and that is all what Nathan cares for. I also got myself some goodies and went on updating my computer and rambling about my gaming history.

And now I come to the absolute depressing November after having such a great year till then. This month was just cursed as one bad thing after the other happened. Workwise we were totally overloaded, my wife got her wallet stolen, a mirror crashed down and my father was diagnosed with Leukemia. I think that was by far the worst month I can think off. I mean after so many good memories this year everything was just destroyed in one month. By now we are over most of those terrible happenings but just remembering back makes we feel really empty and also angry. But life goes on and December has been rather positive without anything bad thus far.

How was your year 2018 so far?

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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, Mom in Law, Our cute daughter, Our cute son, Travels

Finland Once Again

August 26, 2018 CrazyChineseFamily 12 Comments

This summer we managed it again to travel to Finland. The last time was back in 2016 and before that we hadn’t been in Finland since we moved to Germany back in 2014. This trip was a bit different from all the other holidays we had thus far as we did not go by plane but by car.

Our plan was to drive all the way from Germany through Danmark and then to Sweden. There we would stay for a night at my Uncle’s house and continue the next day to Stockholm to take the ferry to Turku (Finland). I must say it was not the easiest car ride in my life but we still managed rather well as little Nathalie the Thunder Goat only got grumpy on the last 1-2 hours of each day. The trip from our hometown to my Uncle in Sweden is around 500km and the trip from there to Stockholm another 550km. Besides those long car rides the trip from the harbour to my parents cottage is like nothing at just 270km. At first I was planning to drive from Germany to Stockholm all in one day but that would have been impossible with Nathalie. Of course MIL managed to sleep the entire trip and thus missing both the big bridges (Great Belt Bridge and Øresund Bridge).

The entire trip to Finland and back again clocked at over four days so we had only ten days in Finland of our two-week (unpaid) holidays. The first week we stayed at my parents cottage at Nummijärvi where I had once again more than enough work to do from mowing the lawn over chopping firewood to trying to figure out why the boat engine isn’t really working. Besides that we also visited an old friend of my mother in Vähäkyrö and basically just enjoyed the life at the cottage. Nothing special happened there except that I crashed my drone into a tree so I had to chop that one down as well just after finishing all the firewood tasks, just basic luck for me.

At the cottage both kids finally were able to spend their entire energy each day. Never before it took less than 30s to get Nathan to sleep. Even Nathalie was a manageable beast during that week and slept rather well. My dear Chinese mother-in-law was the basic herself and did strange things such as going out each day with a fly swatter and trying to kill mosquitos or suddenly disappearing into the forest to collect blueberries without proper shoes (there are vipers everywhere!!!). All in all I enjoyed the week at the cottage and the next blog post will be about Helsinki, Moominworld and the trip back to Germany.