Durian Ice Cream

We were on our way to Kuala Lumpur. We stopped in the middle of the 5 hour drive, as large families are prone to do, for a bathroom break at a rest stop. We piled back in the car afterwards, and the car wouldn't start.

A car filled with 9 bodies under the tropical sun is no place to be when the vehicle won't start and there's no air-con, so we all got out as Dad looked under the hood and tried to figure out if there was any obvious solution to the problem.

There wasn't, other than getting a tow.

Only, getting a tow isn't so easy when you're in an unfamiliar part of the country and you have 9 people along with a car that needs to be towed.

Dad figured it out through a series of phone calls, and then we sat down to wait for an hour for the promised tow truck and taxi. We were headed out on vacation, but no one felt particularly happy at this point. Sitting on benches outdoors in the afternoon sun while waiting for a tow truck when you were supposed to be gleefully headed toward you vacation destination...well, that's no one's idea of a good time.

Dad had an idea to cheer us up. There was a man selling ice cream scoops out of a refrigerated box of ice cream next to the bathrooms. He gave us some money and told us to go over and get ourselves some cones. There was only one flavor. We bought 6 cones of creamy yellow ice cream that we assumed was vanilla--it only took one lick before we realized our mistake.

It was durian ice cream.

Durian has a fairly large reputation for itself--it's a prized and beloved fruit in Malaysia, and it's banned from most hotels and taxis due to it's pungent smell. Honestly, it smells like a dumpster. When it's durian season at market, I have to hold my breath to keep from gagging.

On this day, we discovered that durian ice cream doesn't have the same tell-tale smell that its mother fruit does, but the strong taste of the fruit is very present. Many people like durian, many people don't. Everyone in my family ends up on the same side of the durian debate--we don't like it.

Clearly not durian ice cream. We were too depressed to get any photographic evidence. This is a green bean sundae from McDonald's.

So then, we were 6 kids sitting in the hot sun waiting for a tow truck--kids who had been excited by the promise of ice cream, only to be intensely disappointed by the only available flavor. When Dad saw that we weren't eating our ice cream cones, he took one and tried to start licking it, only to find that he, too, thought it was disgusting. We didn't want to appear ungrateful for our ice cream treat...but boy, we also wanted to dump all of those ice cream cones in the trash, and quickly. Mom and Dad gave us permission not to eat them, and we threw them away.

We did not have an easy road ahead of us on the way to KL. Dad and Isaac ended up being able to ride along in the tow truck while the 7 of us ladies stuffed ourselves into a 5-seater taxi with the taxi driver and followed them.

Turns out that the motherboard on our vehicle had conked out and needed to be replaced. Who ever heard of a random car malfunction like that?

{This is Day 16 in my 31 Day series: 31 Days of Growing Up in Malaysia}