For writer Laura Leu, the low point was balut, a Filipino dish that consists of a fertilized duck egg.

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Old timers laze away the hot days playing with grandkids and tending to tasks like drying fish and preserving salted duck egg yolks in the sun.

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The children of today, he wrote, were missing out on "falling into ponds, eating poisonous berries, contracting stomach ache from under-ripe stolen apples, getting lost, being bitten by dogs, fighting and starting fires, sitting in cowpats and acquiring bumps the size of a duck egg on their heads".

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The size of a duck's egg, with 184 carats, the seventh largest diamond in the world was used as a paperweight.

FORBES: Photograph: Andre Fanthome (RAAS)