Dead Sheep

View of Tetuan - the White City - from my hotel balcony.

WARNING: This post contains images of people dismembering, cooking and playing with dead sheep and their body parts.


I’d forgotten it was Eid Al Adha until I saw the drops of blood on the stairs. Most people in Tetuan were slaughtering their sheep just outside their houses, but an elderly lady in the apartment above my pension, had called a butcher in.

Me to Siom: What? You don’t do the sacrifice yourself?
Siom: I don’t know how.
Me: Well, don’t you just…
Siom: No, there’s a way to do things. You have to cook the kidneys first, then the stomach then the head. After that you can eat anything you want.

By the time I had woken up most people had managed to get the horns off their sheep’s head and were trying to barbecue them on fires lit in huge cans or smaller braziers in the alleyways throughout the medina.






I could see what Siom meant. Those horns are clearly not meant to part company with the sheep themselves and even with the rusty saws, machetes and sharpened knives, it was hard work, the frustration only leavened by the festive atmosphere, and good advice from the older blokes in charge.

They look up and see me. Everything freezes.

Me: Peace be upon you! Happy Eid!

Everyone relaxes and I am welcomed in. Yes, it’s okay to take photos! Take one of me! Take one of me!

Pig Trotter Karaoke.

Sheep skins were being turned inside out and collected by other guys, before being deposited outside one of the old medina gates, where they go on sale the following day.





This is not a tourist city. You can still see a 'real' Morocco - a Mediterranean Morocco, in which Spanish is the second language - everywhere you walk.

And people greet you, as a guest to their town. How lucky am I?

The medina starts to reopen post Eid. The very relaxed dog is not for sale.

Cat relaxing in medina. This one's unusually privileged. But most get their own piece of cardboard to protect them from the rain.

The barber shops reopen - all 20 of them side by side.

Milk sold in plastic bags.

Woolly tights seller. I regret not buying the brown ones with the orange, pink and red stripes.

Yummy Tetuan confectionery: Nougat, peanut brittle and some disgusting stuff that tastes like seaweed but is made from Anise.

A chanting funeral procession from my hotel balcony.

After a rocky start, it's good to remember why I came to Morocco.

Moroccans!

Eid Mubarak. And happy holidays. In every sense.

Simone the Recollected.