Murderous Shrimping Date - Taipei, Taiwan

Murderous Shrimping Date
Taipei, Taiwan

On a trip to Taiwan, my friend Zac took us shrimping. What is shrimping? Exactly what it sounds like” fishing for shrimp, with hooks and bait. These are not your normal little shrimp you find in: the grocery store, these are huge suckers from Thailand, about the size of a hotdog, with claws. If you come back in your next life as a Thai shrimp in Taiwan, it means you screwed up big somewhere in life; and God has a funny sense of humor.

Life in a Taiwanese shrimp farm, begins nice and comfortably, the shrimp are hatched and live their lives fully taken care of with food and warm water.

It’s Huge!

Shrimp grow quickly at temperatures of about 68° F, (yes I am a bio geek at heart), since these guys are big they probably have lived 6 or more months in a nice warm, pool, with no worries. Shrimp can reach full size in just a few months and have a max life span of about 2 years. Some time after they reach full size they are taken out of their warm pools, and dumped into big cement pools of brown yucky water. Here people come and pay money to fish for shrimp, in the middle of a huge city, by the hour!! Whatever you get you can keep.

You get a pole with hooks, and a plate of bait, chicken liver, and dried little shrimps, and a pocket knife, to help bait your hook, and then you sit and wait. They offer beer, drinks, snacks and things There were grandparents, families, friends, and I think even a few dates going on there. How romantic. Picture plastic deck chairs, around a gross shallow swimming pool with brown water; all of this in a tin roofed shack.

Eventually you see the floater of your pole go down, and then you wait for the shrimp to take the bait and get caught. This is a bit harder than you think, if you pull up right way, the shrimp just gets away with a nice yummy liver dinner. You have to wait till he swallows the bait, and hook; then pull him up.

These suckers are big, with claws!! You have to hold the claws back as you yank the hook out of his mouth, and get him into the bag with the rest of the shrimp that you’ve caught.

Dinner

Once you are done catching all the shrimp of want, you then get to wash and clean then and Rrrrriiippp off their claws. Once you’ve washed and cleaned them, they are still alive, just clawless, you take a skewer and impale them from the ass up to the head. Then when you poor shrimp is wringling but can’t really move because he’s impaled on a skewer, you dip him in a pole of salt, and sick him in the over to roast, alive! So the shimp, in the last day, has been taken from his home, dumped into a pool of cool, yucky water, thought he found a wonderful liver meal, swallowed a hook with his meal, had the hook if not part of his mouth, and stomach ripped out, had his claws ripped off, been impaled up the ass to his head, dipped in salt and cooked alive. And finally eaten with soy sauce and wasabi. Yummy.