Day 8 - Virtual Chaos

• On Friday we had friends over to celebrate Chinese New Year. With kids that's not such an easy task as to achieve a minimal state of tidyness, so you can actually invite people, is nearly impossible. Sisyphus - you know the bloke from Greek mythology who supposedly had this enormous task of rolling some boulder up a hill - well that guy had a part time job in comparison. You don't believe me my dear reader? Well, this time it's easy to actually participate in living the experience of having childeren, if you don't have any. Here are some simple steps you can can follow that should give you a rough approximation of the real thing:
  
  1. Take a big cardboard box (the bigger the room, the bigger the box).
     
  2. Buy toys, lots of toys (any toys will do, but for boys it'd be good to have Lego, cars, dinosaurs, marbles, trains, ... for girls I'm not so sure as I don't have any, but I assume anything pink should suffice). Now stuff the toys into the box.
     
  3. Add food, for realisms sake you should add Pizza, noodles, meat, apple juice, some fruit. Be sure to leave out any vegetables, that would not be really authentic.
  4. Now add some kids clothes (they don't need to be washed), socks, trousers, t-shirts,...
  5. More stuff to put in: childrens' books, some paintings where you don't really recognise what's on (no not Dali, I mean kids' paintings), nappies (empty or full, doesn't matter).
  6. That should be more or less it for the ingredients of the box, could be that I've left out something minor but we don't want to go OTT.
  7. Now last but not least add some explosives: grenades would be good but I guess outside of the U.S. a bit hard to come by, so fireworks might also do the job.
  8. Light the explosives and leave the room. After the detonation, reenter and observe the result.
  The authenticity of the experiment can be easily verified: Nearly the whole room should be covered with bits of the box's ingredients. Is there still any room to walk on the floor? YES!? Well then a) you didn't put enough stuff into the box or b) you might need grenades (or even better weapons-grade C-4) after all - contact jbauer@ctu.gov for any supplies. Now you might say that this experiment can't possibly reflect reality as most of the toys, crayons, etc have been at least partially destroyed. Well :) that was intentional ... trust me! Now try to clean this up WHILE someone else is blowing up more boxes while you are tidying. That's about how it feels in real life.
  
• After cleaning the house our friends arrived and it was a really nice evening where we had lots of jiaozi. Actually I bought 250 as I counted on 25 per person. In the end that were far too many. Funny Big Noses, they can eat 10 "Krapfen" (Austrian version of doughnuts) but think 25 jaozi is too much :)
• When it was jungle book time I convinced Florian to ask Peter, a friend of mine, to watch it with him and Matthias! What a cool move, so Peter (who they now call jungle book Peter) had the honour of being the Disney VJ for that evening.
• Matthias is fascinated by facial and body hair. He constantly pulled John's (another friend) beard and Peter's arm hair. Since Chinese have very little body hair that was a completely new experience for him.