Chinese Shopper Buys Half of Melbourne

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We read that a couple of days ago four men were arrested in Sydney for plotting to blow up planes with meat mincers. I thought the worst a meat mincer could do was chew your hand off, but the intensity of the security at Melbourne airport suggests otherwise.

Issy bought a fancy new camera about a month ago, and I'm keen to get the GST back via the Tourist Refund Scheme (TRS). The man at the camera shop even sent me the link to an app so I could generate a code in advance. He told me that that way we could join the express lane and get our refund really quickly. Whilst the express queue has no people in it other than us, there's only one attendant serving it, and she has her hands full with a Chinese lady who's clearly been doing some very serious shopping. She has a whole suitcase full of shoes, handbags, watches and jewellery, and the attendant is picking her way through a thick wad of receipts. I hear $5,000 mentioned as the cost of a handbag. Huh? The attendant tells the lady she's double dipping - she's claimed for some goods that she's exchanged for others. They get into a heated argument. Meanwhile there are shoes, handbags, watches and jewellery spread out all over the floor and on the counter. The "express" lane queue now has 40 people in it, and the normal lane, which is being served by two attendants, only has five. Three quarters of an hour later the Chinese lady and the attendant reach reach some sort of agreement, and it's finally our turn. I get out the code that I generated using the app, the receipt for the camera, our boarding passes and passports, and I ask Issy to get out the camera. She suddenly looks a bit sheepish. She tells me that she accidentally packed it in our check-in luggage. She asks the attendant whether we can get our money back without presenting the camera, and we're told that we can't. I mumble something about three quarters of an hour of my life that I'll never get back.

Issy's been doing a lot of online shopping in preparation for the flight, and has invested in a vast array of blow-up pillows to support every part of her anatomy. There's one for her to sit on, one to put under her feet, one to put behind her back, and another one that she says you're supposed to be able to rest your head on and put your arms through at the same time. This looks very strange. She starts blowing them all up. The head pillow makes a loud squeaking noise every time she blows into it, and she's now become very self conscious. The only way of blowing it up without making it squeak is to blow it up very slowly, and the whole process then takes a very long time. I begin to think that maybe this a good thing. The flight to Doha is 15 hours, and we manage to kill a fair bit of it blowing things up. I do however worry that we may have sucked too much air out of the cabin and that oxygen masks will soon start dropping from the ceiling.

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