Eid al-Adha

According to Wikipedia, Eid al-Adha is a 4 day festival in which Muslims honor the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son.  Individual families,including urban families, do this by killing an animal and dividing the meat into three parts: one third goes to the family, one third is given to relatives, friends and neighbours; and the remaining third is given to the needy (apparently some people need hunks of sheep).

There are A LOT of families in Egypt.  As a result, the number of animals in the city increased dramatically over the last weeks leading up to the Eid holiday.  Parking lots, the basements of buildings under construction and the occasional sidewalk were all used as temporary corrals for sheep, goats, and the odd head of cattle.  A friend even spotted a delicious looking camel one neighbourhood over. The build up continued until the livestock-to-street-cat ratio was surprisingly even by Tuesday.  Trust me-Christmas tree sales are small potatoes compared to this and there are no artificial animals to be purchased at Home Depot.

A building under construction in my neighbourhood.
My balcony is too small to house the goat on the far right BTW
-I did consider it.

Friends and I were caught trying to snap a secret phone camera photo one night of a sheep stall in our upper class neighbourhood.  We must have looked like we were inspecting the sheep and discussing finances to the urban shepherd boys who asked us if we needed assistance.  I am sure they could not speak enough English to be reassured by the fact that we claimed to be still in the browsing phase. 

The stories about how Thursday's mass slaughter would fill the streets with rivers of blood made the holiday seem like an excellent opportunity to get out of town.  The same group of friends and I decided to go to Cairo for a few days as an alternative to purchasing a dirty and irritated looking farm animal. 

The one obvious flaw in the plan was that the holiday takes place in Cairo too.  Although we spent most of the main feast day in a blood and guts free hotel, we did in fact end up wandering through a local market in the Islamic part of the city.  It was basically closed for business and most of the butchering had been completed by the time we arrived in late afternoon.  The streets were dotted with pools of blood, but it certainly the scene fell short of the description. Several cow heads, a few hunks of fly covered bits, young boys in blood stained t-shitrts, older boys riding mopeds dragging sheep skins behind were the only celebration to be seen.  I have heard reports that the sidewalks in our neighbourhood had seep brain piles every 50 feet or so.  This apparently made the walk to the supermarket more exciting than usual. Even if this is also an exaggeration, I suspect that we got off easy. 

Always a bride's maid....still unclaimed on Friday afternoon.