After I left the Embassy, I went by my program administrator’s office to drop off a box of stuff that I have accumulated during the trip to be shipped home to Oklahoma. Then I went back to my hotel and walked over to the shopping center that is below the twin towers. There is an aquarium in the basement of the convention center that is between my hotel and the towers and I took time to visit it. I had a hard time getting any good pictures but below is one of a shark from the walk-through tunnel exhibit. It is a very nice aquarium. Next I went to the grocery store, or as they call them here hypermarket, that is in the shopping center. I had a special request by email from a friend who is an apple grower in Washington State to check out the produce section and guess what I found – a whole section filled with Washington Apples. Below is a picture to prove it. There were also Idaho potatoes available. Unfortunately, there was no U.S. produced meat in the very small meat section.
After lunch I went to my last meeting in Malaysia. It was with the Chief Executive Officer of a company called TraceTracker Malaysia. They are an IT Company that develops food traceability systems and also Halal traceability systems. Currently most of the interest in their systems is for exports to the EU or Japan but they think that the domestic market will eventually also demand traceability especially for Halal. We had a lengthy discussion about Halal standards and he told me that he thought that there would soon be an international set of standards for Halal that most if not all Muslim countries would recognize. I know that many American companies would like to see this happen, so that they could more easily understand what exactly is or isn’t Halal.
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