Strange Foods

Last night at dinner, I found a chicken head in my soup. This particular soup--or really more of a stew--had large pieces of meat with bone. You take the meat out, put it on your plate, and eat it like you would normally eat a piece of chicken. Now, this was the second day of this soup, we were eating leftovers, and to be honest, it wasn't bad. I stuck my fork into a large piece of meat and I was pulling it out of the broth when I realized that it was staring back at me. It was the whole tavi; complete with eyes, beak, and that floppy thing on the top of the head.

I sat contemplating this head for a while, considering whether or not this was normal. I decided that this was decidedly not normal, so I turned to my host sister, pointed to the soup and said, "Nino, this is a head." She looked up and said, "No, it's probably just the neck." "No," I told her, "come and see--here's the beak, here are the eyes..." She casually got up, walked into the kitchen and brought out a chicken leg. "Here, eat this. This is tasty." Since I was hungry and realized that it was too late to get anything else, I ate the drumstick obediently, trying to ignore the head floating in the soup.

In more appetising news, it's the grape harvest. My host father is hard at work picking and preparing for the wine. Here's a picture of the process: