Silkworms and Scorpions in Wangfujing (Beijing)

YES. REALLY.

Wangfujing is a night (snack) market that was created in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and is a place where you can find very interesting* snack foods prepared by street vendors. Of course, they also have normal food like noodles, cuttlefish, crayfish, etc.

*Some of the more interesting food items: starfish, testicles, duck tongue, centipedes, snake, etc.

Suffice to say, we decided to get the more "normal" among all the weird things and got fried silkworm larvae and scorpions. To be honest, they looked disgusting when they were on the tables and raw, and I nearly did not want to eat them (especially when thinking that maybe the scorpions would still be poisonous if not prepared properly), but when the vendor fried them in his big vat of oil and sprinkled both sticks liberally with salt, they looked safe to eat and rather appetizing (see picture below--Mindy in the middle has the scorpions, I have the silkworm larvae).

Silkworm larvae: Tried these before I tried the scorpions, and I found them to be texturally interesting, because biting into the silkworm larvae was like biting into a crunchy layer and into a dense, protein-like center--overall, you had to chew the larvae quite a bit, and its inner layer was like tightly-packed string (perhaps the silk part, since silkworm larvae is where they get the silk threads from). I know it sounds a bit disgusting, because it sounds like I'm eating crunchy silk balls...you have to trust me that these fried and salted larvae were pretty good.

Scorpions: These tasted like a cross between the fried small crabs that are common in the Philippines, and shrimp--crunchy and soft-shelled. Yum. Would've asked for another stick, but we were in a hurry to get to our next destination.