Of Shanghai: Fighting Crickets

For some, a highlight of the trip, and for others, a kind of creepy diversion: Here are some pictures from the birds and fish and crickets etc market in Shanghai. There were any number of small animals for sale - a variety of fish, a few frogs and salamanders, turtles, tons of kind-of-boring little birds. But the apparent raison d'etre of this market is the fighting crickets. We saw thousands of crickets, though, from tiny little guys to crickets of sizes larger than your correspondent was aware crickets were biologically capable of. We saw any number of people haggling over crickets, and one-by-one taking an endless series of seemingly identical crickets out of their carrying cases (boxes, special cricket canisters, toilet paper tubes, etc.) for up-close inspections. I wish there had been a chance to see an actual cricket fight, because: WTF, cricket fighting?! But we did not. Always good to save something for next time.

Editor's note: This is probably our last post on Shanghai, before we move on to other exotic vacation photos. Sorry, but we haven't been off the compound since we got back from vacation, so until further notice, the travel photos will continue. We hope that we'll get out and take some Afghanistan pictures sometime in February.