May 13, 2019 07:34 PM
I'd never heard of this until today, but apparently it's popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
The news today was that 550 people in the library at the University of Canberra in Australia were evacuated because of a smell that people thought was a gas leak. Responding firemen discovered a discarded Durian fruit in a trashcan.
https://nypost.com/2019/05/13/durian-fru...-gas-leak/
It's not the first time. A building at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was evacuated last year because of a Durian in a cupboard, which people once again reported as a gas leak.
The fruit is a large thing, native to Borneo and Sumatra, weighing up to 1 to 3 kilograms (2 to 7 pounds). It's spiky on the outside, but soft on the inside. Alfred Russel Wallace (the natural selection guy) described its taste as "a rich custard highly flavoured with almonds". But its smell is another matter. Wikipedia says, "Some people regard the durian as having a pleasantly sweet fragrance, whereas others find the aroma overpowering with an unpleasant odour. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as rotten onions, turpentine and raw sewage." The smell will linger for days and for that reason the fruit has been banned from hotels and public transportation in parts of Southeast Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian
The news today was that 550 people in the library at the University of Canberra in Australia were evacuated because of a smell that people thought was a gas leak. Responding firemen discovered a discarded Durian fruit in a trashcan.
https://nypost.com/2019/05/13/durian-fru...-gas-leak/
It's not the first time. A building at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was evacuated last year because of a Durian in a cupboard, which people once again reported as a gas leak.
The fruit is a large thing, native to Borneo and Sumatra, weighing up to 1 to 3 kilograms (2 to 7 pounds). It's spiky on the outside, but soft on the inside. Alfred Russel Wallace (the natural selection guy) described its taste as "a rich custard highly flavoured with almonds". But its smell is another matter. Wikipedia says, "Some people regard the durian as having a pleasantly sweet fragrance, whereas others find the aroma overpowering with an unpleasant odour. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as rotten onions, turpentine and raw sewage." The smell will linger for days and for that reason the fruit has been banned from hotels and public transportation in parts of Southeast Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian