Today
my uncle came to the house with the 60 odd chickens that my mom bought from
some place in Əlimərdanlı (Beth’s village – shout out
to Beth!). Soon all the xanıms (women)
of the village were coming to our house/chicken factory. There was a whole system – first this man
would take a chicken, string it up on a specially set up clothes line (he was
going to use the regular clothes line but that idea was vetoed by my mom
because it was going to get the blood all where we walk), he’d chop off their
heads (sorry, maybe this post should have had a violence warning at the top!)
and let them bleed out on the line. Then
one woman would come and get the chicken after it stopped moving (those things
seriously freak out after their heads are chopped off, it’s kind of nasty) and
dunk them in boiling water for a minute.
Then she’d bring them over to the army of women who would begin the
process of removing all the feathers.
Once all the feathers were removed and the last little remaining
feathers burned off, there was another station devoted to removing all the
organs and a final station over by the sink to wash them out. Before I knew it, all the chickens went from
flapping around the yard to being nicely wrapped up in a bundle to keep out the
flies!
The
last of the chickens… I took some gorier shots but I’ll spare you
The
gutting station, so you can get a sense of the quantity of chickens we’re
talking about!
A
well-deserved rest for tea after all the chickens were put to rest (they are
taking up the other half of the table where the women are sitting). If you look into the background, you’ll see
where the men sat “tasting” the vodka while the women were preparing the
chickens.
Believe
it or not, I was not really involved in this process… I stayed inside (except
for when I was fulfilling my duties as resident photographer) where I kept the
children occupied with toys brought from the US (we’ve had them coloring from a
Lisa Frank coloring book for days but today I busted out the play-doh and
assorted cookie cutter sorts of toys, big hit!). Since that really didn’t take very much
attention except to praise their cutting skills, I have also be boning up on my
snake skills on my old school Nokia phone (for those of you who don’t remember,
snake is a super awesome and addictive game) and kicking my old records’ butts!
Before
all this chicken business began, I went into Tovuz city this morning with Raminə
to the salon. When a girl gets married,
she goes to the salon and gets her whole
face threaded for the first time (before that point, if she
plucks/waxes/threads her eyebrows, she is considered a slut – resulting in a
lot of unfortunate unibrow situations).
Raminə was really nervous that it would
hurt (and when we got home everyone kept asking me if she cried), but besides a
lot of wincing and a red face, she did fine. I also got my eyebrows threaded
while we were there. Our time at the
salon was another interesting look into Azeri pricing for me. I’m constantly amazed by what is super
expensive here and what is dirt cheap.
Today, for example, I learned that an eyebrow wax is 3 manat
(approximately $3.75) while in America at my salon a few weeks ago they were going
to charge me $18 (I told them I’d do it myself). And after the salon, we went to the bazar
where I bought some shoes (albeit a cheap pair) for 6 manat (approximately
$7.50). But then we start looking at
some shirts for my mom and they were 50 manat!! (That’s about $62.50) Yes they were super qəşəng (to an Azeri audience,
to me they were quite heinous) and yes the sellers were willing to bargain down
to a cheap 40-45 manat ($50-56.25) but still!
They are shirts at a bazar!
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