Happy Eid-al-Adha!

Just kidding. But yesterday did mark the first day of this Muslim festival and since Nigeria is about half Muslim, we got both yesterday and today off of work. This marks the second and third mid-week holidays I've already had in my four weeks here. I promise this isn't common; I just happened to arrive at the right time. We don't get any days off for Thanksgiving over here though, so I guess this makes up for it. I won't have any more days off until Christmas.

I'm not extensively educated on the Muslim religion, but the little I do know about this holiday from speaking with a few coworkers is that it's referred to as "The Festival of Sacrifice." One of them mentioned to me that his family would be sacrificing a ram yesterday. This prompted me to at least look up the meaning behind this holiday and essentially I learned that it's a day where families are to sacrifice a ram, goat, or some form of livestock to feed their family, friends, and the poor. It marks the end of Hajj (their annual pilgrimage to Mecca) and commemorates the trials and triumphs of the Prophet Abraham, most especially his willingness to sacrifice his own son at God's command. It's actually quite interesting, so if you'd care to read more here is a link I found useful: http://islam.about.com/od/hajj/a/adha.htm.

So, I celebrated the day off by getting off camp to go see a movie yesterday. There is a theater at the local mall here and I checked out the movie times when I was there on Saturday. A friend and I decided we'd go early to hit an 11:00 showing because the prices were cheaper before noon. Upon arrival and trying to order our tickets, we found out the showtimes displayed on the screen outside are apparently not the actual showtimes. The lady handed us a booklet that had the actual showtimes in it. When I asked her why the screen wasn't updated with the right times, she told me that it gets updated every Friday for the coming week. I told her that I was here on Saturday, which was after Friday, and the showtimes shouldn't have changed in the last two days then. Furthermore, regardless of when they changed, whatever the screen was showing currently STILL wasn't the same as the showtimes for the day. Her reply was simply that it's someone else's job and apparently they're not doing it. End of story. Some things just aren't worth arguing. That's Nigeria for ya. Ultimately, we had to wait another hour for a show to start and didn't even see the movie we originally wanted to. Instead of the four showtimes listed on the screen for that movie there was, in fact, only one showing at like 4 in the evening that day. Whatever. We saw "The Company You Keep," which I hadn't heard of, but it was half-decent.