from Jgirl14’s journal

Years ago I had a durian lolly. It was bad enough to be spit straight out and put me off durian and all things related forever. Today with Mr Lim’s expert guidance this changed.
We met Mr Lim at a fruit stall where we were unsuccessfully trying to buy half a durian. He came over and tried to help the stall owner who spoke no English understand we only wanted half.
Asking Kboy11 if he’d eaten durian before our helper discovered that none of us children had. Upon hearing this Mr Lim who insisted durian is the king of fruit and that if you like it you are a king told us “I’ll go halves with you. I don’t want this boy to miss out.”
While we waited for the fruit to be cut up we learned that Mr Lim who was born in Vietnam lives in Australia and has an office in Auckland New Zealand just near the airport. He also has six children and loves durian especially Thai durian. According to this self-proclaimed expert Malaysian durian is sticky and bitter whereas Thai durian is drier and sweeter.
When the first piece of yellow flesh had been extracted from the spiky outer armour Mboy6 was urged to try it. Cautiously he sniffed the somewhat slimy surprisingly-not-overpoweringly-smelly fruit and then nibbled part of the flesh off a large brown seed.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes I really like it” M6 answered enthusiastically.
“All right I’ll give you the whole thing” insisted a very generous Mr Lim who refused to let us pay anything at all.
Fears that a whole durian would have been excessive were ungrounded - we polished this one off with only the very biggest and two smallest girls not being particularly fond of it (that biggest one was Mama not me; I quite liked it….) And Dadda would happily eat Malaysian or Thai durian and is happy that now he can legitimately buy whole (somewhat expensive) ones knowing there will be no waste.

We are LOVING the abundance of tropical fruit…everything from pineapples and oranges to papaya and mango from green native-to-Cambodia little morsels to bright pink dragon fruit from longans and mangosteen to rambutan and guava from pomelo and bananas to jackfruit and……I think I’d better stop!