Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Holiday season

The holidays came earlier here, as today the people celebrated "Aid Kabeer," which translates as the big holiday. Each family buys, slaughters and eats a sheep on this day. They will continue to eat the meat for the next few days. Karl and I witnessed this from our window today. Needless to say, it was a smelly!


Our neighbors bought two sheep, and put them in our "shared" space, which happens to be right behind our kitchen door. Our kitchen smelled like a sheep barn for about 3 days! The smell is starting to go away (the sheep met their end this morning), but a stench of dead sheep is in the air, and probably will be for the next few days.


If you look closely, you can see the sheep sitting against the door. You can also see plastic bags around our door - this was our attempt to keep the smell out, but it really didn't do anything.


This was the view from our office window.


This is our street. The man below was going around collecting the sheep skins. I'm not sure if he was begging for them so that he could sell them for a bit of money, or taking them to fix for people. Some people like to display the sheep skins in their homes.


I went to a wedding on Sunday, and wore this traditional dress called a "tqsheda." The dress was nice, but was really long, which made walking challenging.