Finally, the moment has arrived -- the festival we have all been waiting for in breathless anticipation is here! That's right -- it is now officially Sea Cucumber Month here in Dalian.
The uninitiated among you might well ask: "What the heck is a sea cucumber anyway?" So here is a helpful quiz to test your Sea Cucumber IQ. Is it (a) California slang for a guy who wears a surfer's wet suit at the beach but never goes near the waves, (b) an elliptoid vegetable growing in the warm salt water of the North Pacific, prized by gourmets when served in a salad with a splash of balsamic vinegar and a touch of triple cold-pressed Tuscan olive oil, (c) Florida slang for those purplish welts that amateur body-surfers get on their foreheads and elbows when the waves plow them into the beach, or (d) an expensive and quasi-edible aquatic bottom-feeding echinoderm with leathery skin and yellow vanadium-bearing blood that is beloved in Dalian as a medicinal panacea, an aphrodisiac, and [when properly distilled] an intoxicant?
If you answered (d), sharpen up your chopsticks and dig right in! You have earned the right to relish your very own sea-slug.
As for me, I certainly hope that there will be a parade with music, floats, and costumed sea-critters to mark the occasion. I wonder who will be named Ms. Sea Cucumber 2008?
http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Cucumbers#
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