Eating Summer Memories

We have all sat outside and heard crickets chirping and the long whine of a cicada hidden somewhere in the trees. well last night i had a someone go into the tree and find one of these ugly buggers... so i could eat him..          

if you dont know what a cicada is, they are the guys that shed their skins on the side of trees that we all used to stick on  each others clothes scare our little brothers with, but we still ran away when a live one came flyin by... or at least i did.

my new room mate, david fung, and i went to a "chuan" place last night for dinner. chuan is basically anything you can imagine cooked on a stick. they had everything from chicken heart to silk worm, to bull penis. i went for the classic cicada. luckily david had his fancy iPhone 4 to document this occasion... enjoy ---->

quick side bar; i am in china, therefore the beer is legal.

the cicada was not what i would call delicious. but it wasn't all that bad. the worst part was just all the little pieces floating around. a but later that night i pulled either a leg or a pincer out of my teeth. the texture was a little weird. the crunch from the outside was accompanied by nice chewy inside that was very pleasing to the pallet.... not really. fortunately i didnt pull one apart to see what was on the inside until after i had eaten one. after seeing what they looked like on the inside i dunno if i could have stomached the bad boy.

one the funniest parts of the whole thing was how interested the locals found it that a white boy like me would eat something like this. one guy even felt that since i could eat one he would order one and give it a try as well. he stomached it better then i did, but he had to wash it down with a swig tsing tao just like i did. . . made me a feel better.

this all happened on a street called "Ghost Street" which is pretty intersting. i'll post about that later on.