Durian

We were on an island yesterday off Nha Trang and it was hot. I'm pretty much incapable of walking past an ice-cream vendor in hot weather and sure enough I found one. I had a very nice green bean ice cream for VND6,000 (!!), which I picked pretty much randomly; she had a big freezer chest full of icecreams of the same type but in different flavours, but with the flavours themselves written in vietnamese so I had no way of knowing what I was getting. I quite like this russian roulette approach to eating, it's served me very well in the past. Still hot, and encouraged by my success with the green bean ice cream I tried another. As soon as I took off the wrapper I realised I'd made a terrible mistake.

It was durian flavored. I like to think of myself as someone who'll eat just about anything, but I've always avoided durians. I've smelled them enough when I lived in Singapore, and I always thought it was significant that there were those signs on the MRT which prohibited 4 specific things, and one of them was durians. That said a lot, I thought.

I manfully ate the whole thing (even my sons were telling me I didn't have to, but noone understands my complex relationship with food). Then I drank half a can of coke to wash away the taste. Bad mistake - for the next hour, every time I burped (coke = gassy) I'd get horrible durian flashbacks. Eeeewwwww.