Last year I got quite excited about the cricket fighting and this year I was keen to get back to the flower and bird market at the rear of the Confucius Temple. 
I was not disappointed. There I found hundreds of little tins containing little fighting crickets. Some crickets were very large and kept in plastic containers with air vents. Surprisingly they weren’t making a noise at all. I chatted to a few of the men about the fighting. They said that the crickets last about 100 days and live in a single grain of rice.
When selecting your cricket you need to irritate him with a piece of grass to see if he’s vicious. If he goes crazy then you buy him. He’s obviously going to be a good fighter. Male crickets fight other male crickets if they come across each other in the wild and so the men take advantage of this to have a bit of fun in the late summer and autumn.
I had heard of big bucks being paid for crickets and being bet on crickets in Shanghai and other cities but in Nanjing all I could find was a few men crouched over a tub while too little black things chased each other around. No money was changing hands here and it was all very good-natured. Last year I bought a cricket for 50p but this year I refrained. My previous one had received a hiding from a cricket twice its size. It just ran away all the time the coward. At the end of the fight I released into the wild.
I watched the men fighting their crickets for a while. They didn’t seem to mind me using flash photographer. They were very obliging and friendly but then Nanjing is a friendly place.
Yesterday I did my weekly commute to Shanghai and today I thought, as I had a day off, I would find the flower and bird markets here to see if there was any cricket fighting to be had. I was very disappointed to find a miserable market with very few crickets and then only the huge ones which the life out of me. There were no tins with the fighting crickets in at all. And there were very few birds. Nanjing is far far bigger and certainly more friendly.
I did notice however that in Shanghai the mega crickets were very vocal. I don’t know why this should be but in Nanjing they were silent. The Shanghai crickets were so noisey that I took this video to show you. Even through the traffic noise they are deafening.
I continued along Jiangpu Lu and walked through some very narrow hutongs (old parts of the town). Of course I got a lot of stares but the residents were pretty friendly. They were selling some fantastic food. I was especially interested in the spit roast chicken which they had “butterflied” first. I was hungry but couldn’t justify buying a whole one even though it would have been very cheap. I waited and got some 70p noodles and soup instead. I don’t like going into back rooms of noodle stalls where the owner manages to squeeze in a few tables. I sat at a very dirty table surrounded by men making slurping noises. In the corner was a man making stretch noodles and throwing them into the boiling water which was supervised by the noodle stirrer.
In fairness the noodle soup was good and I don’t feel at all ill even after 5 hours.