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I wish I could get a detailed information about statistic of  the Hajj pilgrims in 2008, the country list with the number of people from each. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia appoints the number of pilgrims from each country should not exceed 0.1% of the country population, though I am not too sure if it’s 0.1% of the whole population or 0.1% of Muslims population in each country. But from newspapers I read Malaysia sent 27,000 people so I assume it right to be 0.1% of the country population. Significant major pilgrims groups are from Turkey, China, Iran, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, Pakistan.. just to name a few, besides local Arabs in Saudi and nearby countries. It’s real AMAZING to see people from the whole wide world gathering in one place, and they are all around you! I couldn’t help being so excited to identify every single person I met in the mosque, in the streets, in the shops, the yard.. of which country they belong to. Generally they were wearing traditional dress or uniforms, or certain labels on the shirt/scarf/bags written on it the country name, or the country flags as their identification. Since you can never know when you may get lost in the crowd of 5 million people, or lose your group, so it’s important to let people know visually which country you come from.

It was getting more intriguing when I met peeople from countries I really didn’t know where on earth they’re located, like Cote D Ivoire, Togo, Sychelles.. I was like, “Oh, there are people in those coutries!”. LOL.  Same goes for the countries having Muslims as minority, like Italy, USA, Australia and South Africa, Russia.. I have met a number of people from there. If there’s a chance, I would greet them and see if they could speak English. I would take their pictures, a few of which I asked politely, while thre rest are good candid photos haha. I wish my phone camera was 24-7 ready for that purpose so photos of people from EVERY country could be captured. But I wasn’t very lucky and didn’t have much time. Anyways. Below are some of the photos  I’d like to share.

Iran

Malaysia

Russia

Bangladesh

Nigeria

Bosnia-Herzegovina

China

Okay, and photos of many other countries can be found in this Flickr set :)

See you.