Chinese Version
11-19-2021，Saturday, Sunny

I was planning to stay in bed until noon on Saturday, because I was on an intermittent fasting schedule and my first meal should be at 1:00pm in the afternoon. My daughter asked me to get up anyways and saying it’s better to have breakfast together on weekends.

The three of us, my daughter, Alex, and I sat down and ate the freshly-baked ground beef egg scallion pancake and freshly-steamed pork bun, all prepared by my daughter. She pointed to the iron baking pan that had the pancake in it and said, “This pan is good for baking cheesecake.” Alex asked, “Can you make cheesecake?” She said: “Grace bakes much better cheesecakes than I do. So I don’t make cheesecake.” After hearing Grace is good at making cheesecake, I had a story to tell Alex : “The cheesecake baked by Grace is very good and not too sweet. In 2019, Eileen asked Grace to make a cheesecake for her grandfather’s 90th birthday. I put the cheesecake in a glass container to bring back to China. Before my boarding, the American security inspector picked out the glass container with the cheesecake from my bag and held it high to look inside from the bottom of the container, because the cover was opaque plastic. He probably wanted to see if there were any foreign objects in the cheesecake. I told him it was a homemade cheesecake as a special birthday gift, he looked at me doubtfully but returned the glass container without opening the lid.”

Alex laughed as soon as he heard my story. He told us a funnier story about passing through the airport security check with a jar of white power and white crystal in a plastic bag inside the white power. Once, he accompanied his parents on a trip within the USA and chose Airbnb because they wanted to cook their own meals during the trip. His family are northerners who are used to flour based foods, such noodles and breads, so his mother put white flour in a large jar and put a plastic bag of salt inside the white flour, and then put the large jar of white flour in one of their carryon luggages. While passing the security check at the airport, the security inspector picked out the large jar of white flour and asked, “What’s here?” “It’s white flour.” “Is there anything else inside your flour?” “No, just flour.” Then the security inspector put his gloved hand into the flour and took out a bag of white crystals, hold it up and asked, “What’s that?” “Oh, it’s a bag of salt.” Then the inspector tasted the white crystal in the plastic bag to make sure it was salt.

I haven’t flown in nearly two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The memory of the security inspector’s expression while holding up the glass container with the cheesecake and looked at the bottom of the container in March 2019 is still vivid. The unexpected encounters during a trip often became memorable experiences. Today, while having a fresh homemade breakfast at home, we enjoyed sharing our memorable trips of passing security inspection at airports from more than a year ago. A small bag of white crystals inside a big jar of white power makes for a very funny story.

1. The iron baking pan and the leftover ground beef scallion egg pancake:

2. Because of COVID-19, I didn’t take any flight since November 2019. It is very sad that the COVID-19 situations worldwide is still drawing large amounts attention in recent days:
Right after reading my cousin’s post: “Chengdu has ‘reopened! Chengdu is marked low risk (of COVID-19) 2021-11-22 at 23:00:00’”, I read COVID-19 is severe in Germany again. “4 days ago, on November 18, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s disease and control center, has reported 65371 new cases within the last 24 hours”. I didn’t expect that the pandemic sweeping the world in 2020 would still interfere our life from one place to another at the end of 2021.