Eid Mubarak!

Today is the start of a 3-day public holiday in the UAE and the greater Muslim world for Eid al Adha, or the "Festival of Sacrifice". The phrase "Eid Mubarak" could be translated to mean, "Happy Eid". Read about it on Wikipedia.

The Muslim holidays are based on the Islamic calendar which follows the cycles of the moon. This makes forecasting the actual day of any given Muslim event or holiday seem rather arbitrary to us non-Muslims since one must wait for the announcement from the "moon sighting committee" which comes only a few days (or less) before the actual date. With a company policy that requires vacation time to be booked a minimum of 6 weeks in advance, things rarely work out as planned. It was previously thought that the Eid holiday would fall on Friday/Saturday/Sunday however turns out it starts today (Thursday).

We will also be celebrating UAE National Day soon which is also a public holiday. That one is more predictable, it is always December 2 regardless of what the moon is doing.

For the Eid holidays and National Day I decided to go on a scuba diving trip to Malaysia (with a short stop in Brunei). In a few hours I will meet my group at the airport and off we go. We will be staying on the Island of Mabul for 4 days of diving and at least two of our dive days will be to a near by island of Sipidan which, by all accounts is a phenomenal dive location! I hope to see hawksbill turtles, frog fish, octopus, baraccuda, manta rays, eagle rays and whale sharks but I might pass on the "muck diving". What I hope I DO NOT see are pirates! Seems there is some risk of that in that area.