Bazar 1

Bazar, in Kurdish, means marketplace. Every city and town in Kurdistan has a main Bazar, where literally everything you could want, you can get. The Silemani marketplace takes up over a dozen streets, and a couple of square miles. You can find electronics such as the latest model call phones and USB drives, to shoes, to sweets like baklava, to baby chicks being sold as pets, to cologne, to air conditioners, all in the same general area.

Things here are relatively cheap, downright a steal in some cases. My little brother has been asking for a pet his whole life, so we got him one here. We got him two beautiful birds, each for $8. I'm pretty sure I saw something like that in the U.S. for over $80 each.

Treating animals well is not a top priority here though. Some of the conditions of animals being sold for pets in bazar are appalling. Here we saw baby chicks being sold for $1.50. They weren't normal chicks though. Using food coloring, the chicks were pained all the colors of the rainbow in order for little kids to bug their parents enough to buy them.

They also have juice shops everywhere, along with sweets. The juice of the country is called "mawizh", a delicious purple drink made of a variety of grape grown here in Kurdistan. I looked forward to drinking it the four years I was away, and every time I go to Bazar, I make sure to drink some. The taste is unreal, unlike anything I've had, still. Orange and pomegranate juices are also served, all in a rectangular container that keeps the juice running through a refrigerated cycle to keep them cold.

The bazar consists of shops called dukans. The owners or keepers of the shops are overwhelmingly men, even those that sell such things as ladies undergarments. I visited a jewelry dukan today, where I bough a ring made of surgical steel and pretty black crystals for only $1.50, which in the U.S. would have probably cost over $!0.