Aid Al Adha part deux

Last year I posted about this holiday (Click here for a refresher), but for whatever reason I didn't get the full Aid experience.

Something I was vaguely aware of at that time, but not affected by, was the existence of teenaged boys wandering the streets dressed in the discarded sheepskins. It seems they travel in packs, preying on the unsuspecting, whacking them on the backside with a sheep's hoof (paw? foot?) when they're not looking. The idea is they collect money for a neighborhood party, to be held at the end of the three-day Aid holiday.

I witnessed scores of young kids and teenagers running down the streets, shrieking with excitement as they were pursued by these monsters, only to be rewarded with a thwack on the rear when they were caught. It looked like good fun, if I were 10 or 15 years younger. At any rate, we got some fuzzy zoom-lens photos of a couple of these characters, taken from Shan's living room window.


This year I happened to be traveling in the days leading up to Aid, so I got to see a few villages' makeshift sheep markets, which consisted of lots of people milling around looking at lots of sheep, haggling over prices, and eventually carrying one home strapped to a motorbike. So many sheep balanced acrossed motorbikes -- live sheep, that is -- and I only saw one fall off. Pretty amazing. Here's a photo of the sheep market in a village halfway between Agadir and Marrakech (dunno the name of the village).