Sparky the Fruit Sniffing Beagle

-

One last little tale before I consider this trip officially over.

I was surrounded by those orange shirted students from the plane while waiting for my bag to appear, they having cleared customs.

Off to my left, a small drama was unfolding. A Border Patrol officer with the cutest Beagle I'd ever seen was checking out one of the students. He told him to take off his backpack and the kid (of course) didn't understand. So the officer politely helped him remove it. He told the kid to set it on the floor, whereupon Sparky went to work sniffing and wagging.

Sure enough, the kid was holding - a dozen Chinese apples. Sparky looked on proudly as the officer told the kid "next time, no fruit." Sparky stood there beaming at his owner, clearly proud to be able to do his part to keep our borders safe.

And so it goes, back home once again.

Here's a summary of my walking around pictures.........


























'

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Have a lumpy roux? Use a cheese grater.

-
Image
Unlike a regular US Thanksgiving, our Chinese version turned out to be a moveable feast and a pretty full weekend to boot. A day of work after our great expat evening out led to a night of music and Sichuan cuisine. I had plans to attend the most recent installment at the Kai Fa Qu theatre, a string group by the name of Trio Broz. According to the musician’s biography, they are specialists in arrangements of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which I thought sounded pretty intriguing. When my regular music companions were laid low with what seems to be getting everyone around here I made plans with some other friends to pick up tickets and for them to collect me about a half hour before the concert for the short ride down the road. Normally I’d walk, but we were in the middle of a wind enhanced deep freeze so I though a ride might be in order. As it turned out I would have been better off on foot since standing in place outside your building in the sub zero temperatures and a roaring wind whi
Read more

A regular day

-
Image
A word or two about food. In China, dinner is a completely different event than what we are used to in the west. First of all, large quantities and a vast selection of food is brought to the table. Secondly, you don’t take your “share”; you eat a little, spin the Lazy Susan and rest a lot between mouthfuls. It’s all about turning dinner into an event for visiting. And you order so much that you leave some behind, as a gesture to the host indicating that you have been served plenty. The last two meals for me have been grand repasts. Last night the IT team went out for a traditional Shanghaiese meal in a 1930s converted row house. The trip in to our private room was down a multitude of halls and up continuous little staircases that evoked the passage into Gryffindor Tower in the Harry Potter books. The room we had was more than likely a bedroom in the home of a prosperous, pre-war family. As always, the food was delicious and interesting. A mixture of hot and cold dishes comprising the f
Read more

NO8DO

-
Image
Last fall I decided to get a tattoo - not so much to express my individuality (as just about every other person has now done) but more to have the experience of getting needled as well as to see how having a permanent piece of portable art would make me feel. The problem was what to get. Tattoo shops are loaded with catalogs of both standard drawings and freelance work. The breadth of options is staggering if you only want something canned. My thoughts went in the other direction - I wanted something that meant something to me, characteristic of my life experience. So I thought about meaningful statements, written in Sanskrit or some other obscure language, or maybe something to do with a bicycle. Or maybe something Chinese. Or who knows, the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want a giant orange Japanese Koi wrapping around my biceps. One day it came to me. While wandering around Sevilla last year, we saw the same logo over and over, on anything that had to do with the m
Read more