Published by Swiss James on 12 Jun 2008
Xiao Long Xia
The land all around Pudong airport is either reclaimed from the sea, or was farmland.
In fact all (or most) of the security guards and cleaners who work in or around the airport once farmed the land- one minute you’re breaking your back in the sun, the next you’re sat in a control room, asleep in front of a bank of CCTV monitors. Life is sweet.
As with a lot of airports then, the surrounding area has loads of wildlife; there are frogs everywhere, Land Tigers, and now this thing:
It’s a Xiao Long Xia (little lobster) in Chinese, some people call them Crawdaddies in English. They live in freshwater, often rice paddies and are about the size of a baby’s foot.
They’re good eating, at this time of year there are glossy Salmon-pink stacks outside restaurants up and down town.
This is the first live Xiao Long Xia I’ve seen though, it was scuttling along the road at 4am this morning as I finished work. I don’t mind telling you that hey look ‘orrible on a shadowy road at that time at night, at first I thought it was some kind of Scorpion.
I did not, however, scream like a little girl. I screamed like a man.
