Eid mubarak

I had the first Eid of my life. And it was really, really nice. Beside that my illness of the other day went on and I had to stay in bed two out of three eid days.

Even though I had a brilliant time celebrating this big Muslim festival in an Afghan family.

The first thing I found really funny was, that nobody knew when Eid would actually be. Thought that they’d fool us when I read a sign in front of the Goethe Institute in Kabul saying: “If Eid is on Wednesday, we will be off from Wednesday to Saturday. If Eid is on Thursday we will be off from Thursday to Sunday.” – What the hell?!? Imagine somebody tells you the 23^rd of December: “If Christmas is tomorrow we’ll be closed, if not, not…” The reason for this confusedness actually is, that Eid is celebrated after the moon-calendar, the first day after the new moon actually comes out. And this somehow you never know exactly before you actually look into the sky the night before.

The night to Wednesday then .. we were all hoping for a day of postponement cause nobody was prepared. I didn’t have new cloth yet, which is somehow a very crucial point so that the father of the family insisted to go with me to the “Bazaar” and to buy me a new skirt; the house wasn’t cleaned enough and other things had to be bought. The kids were running around spreading rumours that they had seen the moon but we finally went to bed without any confirmation as the power was cut (as almost every night) so that we couldn’t see the announcement of some Mullahs in Saudi Arabia. But the next morning I got woken up at 6am as usual. Not Eid – Ufff…

The first day of Eid (Thursday) we all woke up very early and spend hours to prepare the guest room with tons of dry fruit for all the family member, friends, colleagues etc. who should drop by one day or the other while the men attended the special congregational prayers in the mosque.