Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Singapore customs officer at Causeway

Returning from JB last night after a day of shopping, I was at the Singaporean customs area where they check the vehicles. It is a standard practice that all vehicles entering Singapore must undergo a visual inspection by the Singaporean authority. When it was my turn for this inspection, I got out and open the boot of the car. The boot was full of bags of shopping and various kinds of fruits. The usual type of questions asked are, "do you have any cigarettes? do you have any drinks, meaning beer, spirits or wine?" My answer has always been "No, I do not drink or smoke".

Last night was somewhat different. None of the usual questions were asked. Instead this customs officer, with his unsmiling face looked at me and poked around the boot. The conversation went like this,

"What have you got in the boot?"

"Some shopping for food and fruits in JB"

More poking around, opening up bags and digging deeper into the pile of shopping bags.

"You got meat?"

"No, I do not have any meat in my shopping bags".

He reached into a bag containing a few sachets of curry powder and came up with a pack that says, "For meat curry". He held this up in infront of my face, almost shoving it up my nose, pointing to the word "meat", and said.

"You have meat, SEE?"

"No, it does not contain meat, it is for cooking meat, it does not have meat in it at the moment".

"It is meat, it is here on the packet".

"It is curry powder, no meat". I said.

Looked at me to see if I was shivering with fright. I was not, but quite amused by this ignorant twit.

Grudgingly he threw the pack back into the bag and poked around a quite a lot more, obviously still not satisfied that he did not find anything. I could see he was out to catch me on something and because he did not find anything he was quite unhappy. Stared at me a little more to see if he could detect any guilty twitch. I smile back and muttered under my breath, "have your fun, you ignorant bast***. With a wave of his hand as if to dismiss a slave, he indicate that I could close the boot. With that he just strode off.

Well, if he had bothered to look into the car, on the back seat I had 500 cartons of cigarettes, 100 bottles of bootleg liquor, 250 live chickens, 50 pigs, 45 cows, 300 sheep and a partridge on a pear tree.

What an experience !!!

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