January 09, 2007

Travelling whilst Muslim/Malaysian

A brother who has been an Aussie citizen for almost all his 20 plus years of his life told me he was detained for about 2 hours when he came back from his hols to Malaysia last year. The airport personnel asked him why did he choose to go to Malaysia? He told them that he likes Malaysia! He told me that he probably got detained coz he wears a kufi/kopiah on his head. So I guess they do some racial profiling on muslims especially supposed young single muslim men sometimes. The bro is married with 4 kids. This year if he gets detained by airport staff and if they ask him why Malaysia, he can say it is Visit Malaysia Year 2007!
I have some airport tales but not as dramatic as the brother's story. I lost one of my kid's metal spoon (why on earth did they confiscate that?) at heathrow airport once and a small penknife at the airport in Oz . I sometimes like to bring a swiss army victorinox penknife to cut open food wrappers for my children. My sister bought me a pretty flowery swiss army penknife from Switzerland when she went there in oct of last year and when I wanted to travel to Bangkok a few weeks ago, my dad being ever security conscious, asked me to surrender all sharp objects to him before boarding the plane. I gave him the flowery penknife and it is still in my dad's possession as I forgot to take it back. Anyway, I managed to buy 2 nail clippers at the airport terminal before I boarded the plane. My nails were bugging me. I had to cut my nails on the plane.
Well, the customs at the airports in Oz are more interested in the food products you bring in their country than anything else. We declared that we were bringing some food as usual when we came back from KL. Dh forgot to buy plastic wrappers with bubbles and so he stored some of the soya sauce bottles in our baby's clean nappies so that it would withstand the impact of bag handling at the airport. He was really serious in bringing the bottles of kicap/soya sauce as the ones sold in Oz were quite bland by Malaysian standard. However, it wasn't the bottles in the nappies that caught the attention of the custom officer. He immediately zoomed in on 4 packets of our 3 in 1 instant teh tarik and 1 packet of 3 in 1 instant nescafe and took them out of our food bag and stacked them outside. We hoped for the best when we saw this but in the end the whole 5 packets got confiscated as it had milk/dairy products in them. Dh was a bit stunned to learn that milk/dairy products processed in Malaysia didn't get to be on the list of countries that follow Oz's perfect hygiene standards. If only the 3in 1s were manufactured in Singapore. I bought the 3 in 1 teh tarik packs for dh knowing he loves teh tarik, the hot cup of very sweet frothy milky tea fare in Msia.(As for me, I don't drink coffee and I prefer tea with milk and no sugar). Poor dh, I guess he has to drink the normal bland aussie fare for the coming months.

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