Thursday, November 10, 2011

Halloween and Eid

After experiencing utter disappointment over Halloween in South Africa, when my friends and room mates refused to celebrate with me, my expectations for Uganda were incredibly low. However, a week before Halloween arrived I made a new friend from Germany named Bettina who was keen to experience her first Halloween and as it turned out so were a number of other people. So, on Oct 29th I brought together a small group of friends, made candy and grasshoppers available and we all dressed up in costumes. The highlight of my night was that everyone who was there let me paint their faces which was really exciting.

The following night I attended a larger Halloween dance party with many of the same friends and once again painted faces and enjoyed dancing with the different characters that turned up, although I wasn't a fan of the man who showed up as a rape victim (which he chose because he was told he needed to be something scary).

I was a fairy for Halloween which was a rip-off of my pixie costume from two years ago, but at least I had something.

On a completely different festive note, last weekend was Eid. Uganda has a fairly large muslim population including my Turkish neighbour who at sunset gave our gatekeeper, Peter, and entire cow's worth of beef and its head. Imagine my surprise when I came home to find a cow head in my front yard. Peter insisted on sharing some of his beef bounty with me and provided about 5kgs of meat, still attached to the bone. In a bizarre twist of fate we had a couch surfer from Equador staying with us that was able to separate the meat from the fat and bone. Without her I might have been lost. Now I won't need to buy steak for the rest of my trip :).

Pictures to follow

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