This is the story of how I convinces a group of innocent volunteers to eat the biggest, ugliest bug at the Chiang Mai Sunday market…
After a day of motorbike explorations, we sat in a small cafe near Thapae Gate sipping fruity smoothies and cooling down. On my second sip I had an epiphany, “Let’s eat bugs today!” Every Sunday a sweet little Thai lady gathers all her dead, partially dead, or soon to be dead bugs and heads to the market place to show her munchable friends to oogling foreigners and bug loving Thais. I had been waiting for just the right moment to dare a group of people (preferably males) to a bug munching competition and the time was exactly right, we were all suffering from an adrenaline overload from jumping off a cliff into a waterfall and extremely hungry. To my surprise Kyle responded with a very serious face, “Today is the day we eat bugs.”
So we went in search of the bug lady…She had big bugs, small bugs and in between bugs…Nick got a weird glint in his eye and said it would be lame if we didn’t eat the BIGGEST bug there ever was…with a falling feeling in my stomach, I told him I’d munch anything he munched… Kyle tried desperately to talk us out of our decision, he couldn’t be shown up by a girl…but to no avail. We left the bug lady with our arms full of plastic baggies full of cooked buggies. We found a quiet table to set out our wares with coke chasers and convenient shadows to run to if our stomachs weren’t as stupid as our brains…
First, Kyle eyed Mr. Massive Bug…
And Mr, Massive Bug eyed him back…
We finally convinced Nick to go first (he decided to play with the bug a little bit before giving it a good munch)…
And then we watched closely to see if he died…
He didn’t, but Anna and Kyle nearly did…
Guess what?! We survived! We were so proud of ourselves we pranced around the the market place. For proof check out this FB video.
The world doesn’t look quite the same after you’ve eaten the biggest bug you’ve ever seen. On the way home a cockroach tried to surprise us (Like they always do) by running out of a hole on the sidewalk right under our feet…not one of us blinked, we kept walked unimpressed muttering, “We’ve EATEN bugs bigger than you buddy…*sniff*”
1 Comment
that’s protein 🙂 Its clean. thumbs up!