I once singed my eyebrows and burned a hole in my favorite messenger bag while setting a ping-pong ball on fire. (I had just discovered they were made of nitrocellulose.)
In all seriousness, I’ve never done the Hajj myself. Everything I know is second-hand, but everyone who’s ever made the pilgrimage basically tells you the same story with variations on the particulars. The crowd I tend to hear about it from are pretty well off, though. So I haven’t gotten any of the stories of what it’s like to do if you’re poor.
One fun story a friend told me is that the Saudi religious authorities do enforce Islamic law during the Hajj, and there was a man attempting to cut or shave his hair (on his head.) Men are supposed to shave their heads at a certain point in the process to signify purification and spiritual “rebirth” but you can’t do it too early. So this guy was trying to shave his head in public (because as I said earlier, everyone is doing everything during the Hajj and it’s all pretty much happening all at once) and the religious authorities appeared and wordlessly took his shaving kit from him and walked away, leaving him half-bald and bewildered.
