Cultural shock

Coming here for the third time this year, I thought that nothing can really surprise me any more.

But... well I was wrong. One of the biggest religious celebration in Tunisia is Aid el Adha or ‘’Festival of the sacrifice’’. There is a custom of sacrificing a sheep/ram that is following this celebration. Just writing about it doesn't really sound so shocking and my parents are wondering right now why would that shock me cause I saw plenty of animals being killed on the farm of our family. However, I never expected to hear beeee from almost every apartment in my building in a fancy neighborhood of a 4 million people capital city.


After the initial shock I wanted to explore this custom a bit more. So, according to Wikipedia, Aid el Adha is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael as an act of obedience to God, before God intervened to provide him with a ram to sacrifice instead. The meat is divided into three equal parts to be distributed to others. The family retains one third of the share, another third is given to relatives, friends and neighbors, and the other third is given to the poor & needy.

My boss, Mr. Zouhair, invited Julia and me to spend this day with him and his family. By the time we arrived, ram was already sacrificed and we witnessed only cleaning of the animal. For me it was not a big deal, but Julia on the other hand had a bit hard time watching this :) just look at her happy face. We spent a lovely day with Mbarek family and thank you once again for having us there. We really had a great time and it was pleasure meeting all of you :)

3idkom mabrouk to all my friends celebrating this holiday