Last weekend I was checking out my hometown newspaper online and I found the most ironic article. If I hadn’t come to Azerbaijan, it would have just been a normal article, but now that I’ve lived here it’s anything but. “Residents Want to Raise Chickens in TC” had me laughing out loud because it’s an everyday, normal occurrence here. My guess would be that about 50% of people have chickens in their yard, and most likely other animals too. My host family during training lived in an apartment so there were no animals there and my host family in Ucar did not have animals. But my landlord does. There’s a rooster, six or seven chickens, and some chicks. It’s also not uncommon to see a couple cows wandering the streets, snacking on the grass growing on the side of the road. So pets are rare (why would an animal live inside?) but barnyard animals are as common as tea (really, it’s a miracle if you can go a day without drinking it). I grew up on a farm so the being around animals isn’t all that strange, but doing it in an area where there are lots of people is; even more odd is that none of them are fenced in. They just seem to wander – for example, my landlady’s chickens usually stay on her property due to the gate/wall, and inside there’s a coop for them to sleep in but they randomly walk everywhere. Sheep are shepherded through the city, albeit in smaller herds than outside of the city, and cars are accustomed to waiting for animals to finish crossing the street. At least here people know where their food comes from!
It certainly does say something for the patience of Azerbaijan people as a whole. How do you think that’d be received in the US? I can just picture it in my last apartment complex…
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