Bad News For My Little Friends

Last year at about this time, I was taking home the cicada shells I'd found, and this old man asked me if they were for making medicine.  That was funny, but this piece of news is not:  I just learned that Chinese residents in Busan are congregating in an ecological park every evening to sweep up all the cicada nymphs they see... to eat!

I know eating bugs is really not all that uncommon, but still, these guys are one of my favorite species of insect...  Is the torturous pleasure of listening to the deafening din of cicadas buzzing every summer in danger of disappearing from Korean cities?

"Train To Busan"

On a whim, I took a train ride to Busan.  I was rather surprised to see much of the city is quite hilly, almost like San Francisco;  I had naively expected it to be all flat, being a big port.  And some of the streetscape actually made me think of Japan, with all the crowding and the old vertical shop signs.  But then, Busan is at the southeastern tip of Korea, where it's the closest major city to Japan (it's common knowledge that the southeastern dialect of Korean sounds rather like Japanese in pitch-shape and accenting;  it could be due to the historical fact that in olden times this was the area where Japanese merchants were allowed to set up shop and do business - at least some of them must have settled for good, married and left progeny that spoke both languages).

Anyway, I had some time to kill before the return trip, and as chance would have it, there was a bus tour of the city that fit right into the schedule.  This shot was actually taken through the bus window as the vehicle wound around a cliff road.