Eid Al-Adha or Festival of Sacrifice

Today was the start of the official Eid Al-Adha here in Saudi Arabia. We have the entire week off of school for this holiday. The Eid Al-Adha or Festival of Sacrifice is a Muslim holiday to remember and commemorate the trial of the Prophet Abraham, particularly the trial of being told by God or Allah to sacrifice his only son Isaac. During the celebration, Muslims will sacrifice an animal such as a goat, sheep, or cow. The animal meat is then divided into thirds, one third for the family, one third for friends, and one third for the poor. During this holiday gifts are shared and it is a time of celebration.

This morning I was walking our dog around our compound and heard the sound of a goat. I thought it was one of our neighbors iPhone apps that he has for his one year old daughter that has animal sounds on it. He was out walking with his daughter as well, so I thought the goat sound was his phone but I was walking farther and farther away from them yet the goat sound was getting louder and louder. I looked over in the front yard of a villa and saw a goat popping his head up and down. It was rather cute but yet sad to think that his life was about to come to an end later that day. We have only a few Muslims living on our compound so I'm not sure who's goat it actually was. Jack went down and took some pictures of him. Unfortunately, he is probably on someones dinner table right now.

We decided to stay here for the week and just enjoy our time off. We went out and bought ourselves an Eid gift yesterday, a 51" Plasma TV. We were a little tired of the tiny compound TV that we had in our villa and gave in and bought us an Eid gift to enjoy this week.
We woke this morning and had our first taste of Beef Bacon. Of course we can't get pork bacon here but the beef bacon is pretty good. We had it in breakfast burritos with my home made tortillas, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and home made salsa. Couldn't even taste the difference.
Our weather has been perfect with temperatures in the low 90's so we took advantage of probably our last day of swimming in the pool. It is supposed to drop 15 degrees tomorrow and will be in the 70's for the rest of the week. The water was a bit chilly but still was rather refreshing.

Of course Vika and Nicole had to model and take tons of pictures.



The compound has lots of flowers blooming right now. We went down yesterday and bought some flowers and two huge jasmine vines in pots to put out on our front porch and walkway. They should be delivered tomorrow. Even though it is November, we are enjoying the beautiful weather and flowers.