Learn Arabic as it is really spoken. Listen to and read Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.
Mostafa tells us how he and his father found their sacrificial sheepโฆ and how it almost got away.
There are just a few days left until the holiday [the Sacrifice Feast], and everyone is getting ready. And of course I am one of them, as I help my mother clean our apartment and get some goods from the market in preparation for meals and visits that take place during the holiday. All of these things were a far cry from what was next, as the thing I like the most about these preparations is going with my father to buy a sheep. And we prepared ourselves to look around for some butchers. And we took into account the qualities that we wanted in it [a sheep]. We went to the first butcher and found he had some good sheep, but the problem was that the sheep were swollen and their bodies were big. And this was because the butcher put a lot of salt in the sheep’s feed, and it makes the sheep drink a lot of water, so when you weigh them, they weigh a lot due to the water in their bodies. So we went to another butcher, and we found he had sheep running around and their health was good and this kind of sheep doesnโt have much fat. So we made the deal with the butcher, who was selling [them] for around 38 Egyptian pounds per kilo. The problem was how to transport the sheep to our home. After many tries, we managed to get the sheep onto a pickup truck, which transported the sheep to the house. But as soon as the car stopped, the sheep jumped out of the vehicle and started to run down the street. All the people in the street started running after him, but thankfully we were able to catch him and calm him down a bit, and we gave him a little alfalfa, so we could get up up the stairs of the apartment building, and we put him on the balcony and tied him up there. And what’s nice is I’ll feed him by hand every day until the day of the holiday comes.
