Going to the chicken market

Most Indians here are vegetarian.  But another trend I’ve noticed the last few times I’ve gone to India is that more and more of the younger generation are starting to eat meat, mostly chicken.  Then there’s me.  Growing up, I was completely vegetarian.  I used to hear people who sometimes ate meat calling themselves vegetarian, and I would get annoyed at that.  You either eat meat or you don’t.  I am now one of those people.  I call myself a vegetarian, but I eat seafood from time to time.  But that’s neither here nor there for now.

Note the shirt, it'll make sense at the end (the shirt, not my enormous strength)

I was strolling around Lucknow one weekend, doing some sightseeing, and attracting a lot of attention...mostly from rickshaw and “auto-rickshaw” (3 wheeled motorized rickshaw) drivers.  They can spot a tourist from a mile away, and I definitely stick out (I was told even my hair alone is enough to give me away).  All of these rickshaw drivers were offering to take me to the chicken market.  “Weird,” I thought, “maybe they think that because I’m not from here, I must eat meat.”  I kept declining over and over to several different people.  Finally, one kept pestering me, and I said (rather forcefully) “NO!  I DON’T EVEN EAT MEAT!!”  Then the guy looked at me and laughed.  That’s when I realized there was some miscommunication going on.  He said that the chicken market was not food, it was clothes.  Not much better in my mind since now I’m picturing clothes made from chicken feathers.  But alas, I was intrigued enough to go check it out.

I get to the chicken market, and I’m looking for feathery clothes.  I wasn’t seeing any.  That only left one option.  Certainly they weren’t using chicken skin (like cow skin for leather) to make clothes?!  Thankfully, they weren’t.  When I walked into a store, the owner explained to me that chikan (note the spelling difference) is actually a type of embroidery that is famous in Lucknow.  I ended up getting suckered into buying a couple shirts, but I really liked them.  I even brought them into work to show off my new “Indian” clothes, when my co-workers told me that one of my shirts wasn’t even chikan, and technically, the other one wasn’t either.  Of course.  In any case, I decided to wear the shirt to Agra, so if you look closely in the picture above (click it to enlarge), you can see some “not technically chikan” embroidery!