Cicadas in Jinan

I love the sound of cicadas. I remember my first trip to Asia many years ago, mid-summer in Kyoto, Japan. I was a typical first-timer, taking pics of everything in sight. But one day I was hiking in a rural mountain area, and the sound of cicadas in the trees was so mesmerizing, I shut my camera and bought a cheap tape recorder. For the rest of the trip I recorded sounds instead of snap-shots. The sound of cicadas didn't leave my mind for months after that trip. Years later, I still remember the sound, and I look forward to it every summer I'm in Asia.



The cicadas make a different sound rhythm in China, at least in Shanghai, where I spend most of my time lately. But I still like it. It's more of a drone here, compared to the rising-falling hum-buzz of the Kyoto cicadas. Turns out there are many different varieties of cicadas, and each has their own sound.

Some cicada fans have made a website about to their favorite bugs -- Cicada Mania: "Dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world."

I'd heard a few times that people sometimes eat these insects, but I hadn't ever seen them on the menu until my recent trip to the cold harsh north.

I had a DJ gig in a nightclub in a second-tier Chinese city called Jinan. Jinan is in Shandong province, and is, I guess, about 5 hours south of Beijing by train. At a restaurant here in Jinan, I checked out the fish tanks and vegetable crates that serve as a menu. A lot of the hotel restaurants and banquet places in China have these areas -- crates and tanks of live animals (mostly fish and seafood, but sometimes more -- more on this in another article), and sample plates of prepared dishes (sometimes plastic versions like you see everywhere in Japan). Anyway, at this Jinan restaurant, there were two items that were easily identifiable as "weird." Scorpions and cicadas. Live ones. The scorpions were really small ones, dull brown, almost colorless critters. I'd already had big black ones, and I wasn't really doing the ordering so I politely ignored them. My host did catch me looking at the cicadas crawling around in a bucket, however, and challenged me to try it. Little did he know, I'm the Weird Meat guy!



So minutes later, we had a huge plate of fried bugs. I'd say about a hundred of these little bite-size insects were deep-fried crispy. Everyone liked them. Even my friend Boya from Texas, usually not as adventurous a diner, enjoyed them.

At one point during our stay in Jinan, I suggested trying some street food. Mr. Boya wasn't into that. So we popped into the safe, global-standard KFC for some chicken nuggets -- and had to spit the first one out as it was raw in the center. Hahah, the irony. Maybe the safer stuff is on the dirty streets.

Let me be frank. Jinan is a boring town. There's not much to do there. I sulked around the new shopping mall district, disgusted with the crass new buildings and pointless, stupid shops. I did find a maze of back alleys behind these tacky new malls, that were bustling with street food. Had a nice bowl of soup with fresh hand-pulled noodles underneath an overpass. Also a really good bbq skewer of quail eggs.

As we were running to catch our plane at the modern Jinan airport, we noticed an airport lobby restaurant had "dog meat and flesh" on the menu, under the "chicken meat and flesh" and "beef meat and flesh".