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We’re now coming into caterpillar season and the rainforest is crawling with them, ripe and plump for the picking.  There are red ones and yellow ones, sold in little piles at the market, and those are just the dead ones.  There are trays of live grub worms comically slithering around.  Maybe grubs don’t keep as long on the shelf.  This is a good time for the Congolese, something that many look forward to all year.  Kisangani is known to have some of the best tasting creepy-crawlies.  We’ll have to wait and see if I am destined to taste this local epicurean delight.

I’ve been hearing about the coming worm season for some time now, but I saw them in the market for the first time yesterday.  We went there to pick up some tiny little fish for the kitten.  I’ve eaten the tiny little fish in Rwanda in soup and deep fried.  Besides bearing a striking resemblance to the ones I kept in my aquarium as a kid, they aren’t half bad.  It’s quite an experience going into the market.  The experience was slightly enhanced by my accidentally parking the jeep right on top of a squashed snake.  They freak me out alive, and they freak me out looking like that.  I jumped over it and we went looking for fish.  I am a major dissapointment for the mamas in the market selling fish.  They buy one or two big fish each day and cut them up into smaller chunks to sell.  When they see me coming they all hold up their big fish by the tail and try to get my attention.  Because I am clearly a foreigner from the West, they know that I must have the cash and if I am in my right mind, I’ll want to buy a giant fish.  I try to tell them that I can’t possibly eat that 25 pound river carp that’s giving me a one-eyed stare, but they don’t speak enough French to know what in the heck I am trying to say.  They just wag the beastly fish at me and try their best to make a sale.  I’m sure they are all disgusted with me when I walk back out with a handful of tiny fish wrapped up in a banana leaf.

I understand that the caterpillars are usually mushed up and made into something like a pancake that’s cooked on a griddle.  Maybe if they let me bring some of my maple syrup to the caterpillar party, it’ll enhance the flavor.