Durians

Rita loves durians, if you've never had one, and you're a westerner, you don't know what you're missing, and you may never want to find out. The day after Chinese New Year, we went shopping on Arab Street and drove past a number of stalls selling the fruit. We stopped so Sun & Rita could get out and find "a good one". They eventually came back with two, a couple of different kinds. Apparently they're graded by their relative stinkiness, and if you're wanting to introduce someone to them, you want to start at the low end of the organoleptic scale before going to full scale warfare on someone's senses. They secured them in the trunk of the car, but you could smell them even from there. Sun made a point of walking up the stairs to his place instead of taking one of the elevators so he wouldn't expose anyone to the smell while enclosed in them. They hustled them through his apartment and out onto the balcony so they could open them and get to the flesh. Here are my impressions:

• Smell: broken sewer at a rubber processing plant. At least this is what it smelled like to me on the outside. The inside isn't as bad, and up close it's almost pleasant, sort of the inverse of how gasoline (petrol for my readers in SE Asia) & skunk can both smell sort of pleasant at a distance, but nasty up close.
• Taste: not so bad (see linked article above for more opinions), I'd eat it again if it weren't for the:
• Aftertaste: well, not so much aftertaste as the burps. They seem to go on forever, and you get the dual pleasure of both tasting and smelling it all over again, long after you though it was over. ugh, naaasty.
  
• Texture: creamy, sort of like a thick pudding with a giant seed in it, not bad actually.
• The edible parts of the fruit are encased in a thick spiny shell, and then some surrounding membrane, so they end up looking like beige lumps in white cocoons. You simply pop the fruit out of the cocoons. To give you an idea of what they look like, here's the Esplanade in Singapore that resembles a durian.
  
• After eating it Rita had her mom pour some water in it. I was curious about this until I read this article.