Eid

I apologize for the lack of my posting, it has been a rather crazy and busy two weeks and I plan to blog about all of my new experiences and events.  To give you a little teaser, I will be blogging about the following:

Celebrating Eid Al-Kabir with Moroccans

Crossing the Moroccan/Spanish border at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and my night spent in Europe

Thanksgiving in Morocco, consisting of all the American favorites (Mashed potatoes, pumpkin and apple pie, chicken with dried apricots – a little bit of Moroccan touch, and of course Mac and Cheese with turkey sausage) and spending the holiday celebrating with Americans, Moroccans, Congolese and even an Italian.

My first visit to the Hamam here (Public baths)

And of course, my big move from the apartment into a home stay with a Moroccan family!

That is a little bit of what’s to come, but for this blog I am going to talk about my experience with Eid.

Now I talked a little bit last time about what happens on the holiday (each family slaughters a ram in honor of the story of Abraham, in which at the last minute God exchanged his son with a ram to sacrifice).  I woke up on the day of Eid, happy to have a full three days off from class, but with no idea of what I was about to experience.  My roommate and I left our apartment around 11 (purposely missing all of the slaughtering that usually occurs in the morning) and headed up on the twenty-minute walk to the bus station.  Within a minute of turning the corner from our apartment I began to see smoke coming from every street corner.  As I got closer I noticed that roasting on open flames was the skull and the legs of the rams.  Supposedly the meat is very delicious in their skull and you first have to burn off the hair to enjoy it.  That was shock number one.  Shock number two came as my roommate and I were waiting for the bus.  Now, not every family knows how to slaughter their ram so there are butchers who spend the day going from house to house slaughtering the ram.  As my roommate and I were sitting, waiting for the one bus that would take us to the small town outside of Rabat and munching on the cookies we had bought as a gift (we were starving…) all of a sudden two men, covered in dry blood from head to rain boot and carrying about four or five large butcher knifes each walked by.  In that moment I completely forgot that it was Eid and was immediately terrified, but after looking around, no one else seemed to take notice of them.  Life as usual on Eid.

After what seemed like an eternity the bus arrived and Moroccan-style, we pushed our way onto the crowded bus.  Once we arrived in the small town outside of Rabat we were greeted by roommates friend and went back to his house. Once at his house, after introductions were completed, the first thing to be done was check out the ram.  Lucky for me, it had already been killed and skinned; however the carcass was still intact and lying right on the kitchen floor.  The most impressive part about all of this is that his mother knew exactly what to do with the ram.  I starred at it for a while and realized that I had absolutely no idea how I would cut, clean or cook any part of this animal.  Luckily for me and thanks to Arab hospitality I did not have to help with the slicing, cooking or preparation.  In true Moroccan hospitality we were given tea so sweet it makes your teeth ache and of course, sweets.  After having my fill of all the different cookies, it was dinnertime.  Somehow, in the time I was greedily binging on sweets, my friends mother had prepared a delicious tagine with the lamb meat.  Normally in tagines, there are a lot more vegetables and not that much meat.  On Eid, it seemed that the tagine was ALL meat, and delicious meat it was.

After dinner, we walked around the town and visited a few of his friends.  One family had an entire cow hung up that they had sacrificed during the Eid.  I really never realized how much meat is on a cow until I saw one slaughtered, stripped and strung up from the ceiling.  It was taller than me. 

Around nine o’clock with full bellies we returned to his house and played some Moroccan card games (which I was horrible at) and slept extremely well. All in all, the holiday felt a lot like our Thanksgiving, at least in the amount of food that was consumed.

The next day we woke up early to travel back to Rabat, taking a Grand Taxi instead of a bus since there was absolutely no room on the bus.  A Grand Taxi in Morocco is a big taxi that holds six people (2 in the front, four in the back) and goes between cities.  They are not the most comfortable way to travel (constantly squashed) but it is efficient between cities and not very expensive. We got back to Rabat in the early afternoon and re-packed because the next day we headed off on our long journey to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta….

For those of you who don’t know, there are two Spanish enclaves in Morocco.  They are not next to each other, but they both are coastal cities in Morocco that belong to Spain.  To get to them you can grab a Grand Taxi that will drive you to the border, and from there you walk over to Spain.  My next blog post will be about my adventure in Spain and all the different methods of transportation I needed to get there.