In The Pyramidst Of Our Lives: An Eid Holiday in Ras Mohamed National Park

A little history/culture lesson: The Eid-Al-Adha holiday falls around the end of October. The dates change because Muslims follow the lunar calendar. This is a religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide. It is to honor the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his first-born as an act of submission to God. But God intervened and provided Abraham with a lamb to sacrifice instead.

To honor this holiday, Muslims sacrifice an animal. It can be a sheep or lamb. Rich families will often sacrifice a cow, or other larger animal. Then the meat is divided into three parts. The family keeps one-third, another third is given to relatives, friends or neighbors, and the last third is donated to the poor and needy. It is a very charitable holiday.

My school sacrificed a cow, (on campus!) and gave the meat to our poor service staff. During this holiday, you will see many animals being sacrificed all over, including in the streets. While I truly appreciate the charity of the holiday, I personally can't stand the thought of seeing an animal being slaughtered in front of me. And that's why Mike and I decided to take a nice holiday break and get out of Cairo for a few days! It was very necessary as I was starting to get a bit stir-crazy and all the little things about Cairo were starting to get on my nerves and make me feel overwhelmed...plus, I couldn't stand the thought of seeing blood all over the streets for 3-4 days!

Some friends invited us on a big group camping trip in Ras Mohamed National Park. So early Thursday morning, the first day of our holiday break, 19 of us piled into a bus at 5am to drive 7 hours to our destination. What should have been a 7 hour drive turned into 12 hours because the military made us stop at every security check point to wait for a police escort to the next check-point since we were all foreigners. It was nice of them to care about our security, but we just wanted to hurry up and get there!

So 12 hours later, around 5pm, we finally arrived at our beautiful campsite on the fabulous Red Sea. We spent five days hanging out, enjoying some sun. We spent our days swimming and snorkeling in the super salty sea. Mike played some volleyball while I laid in the sun to read. We spent our evenings playing cards with our new friends that we met from the trip and sitting around a campfire that the Camp Host prepared for us each night. We were fed three delicious, home-cooked, Egyptian meals a day by the Camp owner. It was a truly relaxing, quiet time away from the noisy chaos of Cairo. We loved every minute of it and it refreshed us enough to be ready to jump back into our lives in Cairo. AND! on the way back, I learned that we had technically been in Asia the whole trip! So I got to cross another continent off the list. 3 down!

Here are some photos of the highlights of our trip. Head to facebook to see more.