Festival of Colors

27 March 2010

Josh, Darcy, Grace, and I drove down to Spanish Fork for the annual Holi Festival of Colors at the Hari Krishna temple. It was kind of amazing. We parked along the road about a mile and a half away from the temple and followed a crowd of clean white t-shirts to the fields around the temple. There were already hundreds of brownish/pinkish people at the site, eagerly throwing color on the rest of us with fresh shirts.

The first thing we did was walk through the gift shop/food court of the temple to the color tent where there were easily a hundred people in the center frantically buying bags of color. They had color baggies of pale blues and greens and also prepackaged fluorescent yellows, oranges, blues, pinks, purples, and greens. Grace marched her little way through and back out again with 15 bags of color. We excitedly divided them up between the four of us and then raced to be the first ones to peg each other with fists of chalk. It was a windy day and the chalk was floating everywhere. It went up our nose, in our ears, in our eyes, layered on our clothes, and caked our exposed skin (and some areas that were not exposed!).

In the center of the field was a stage where at least a thousand people were crowded in front to dance to the music or watch the performers on stage. We walked down to see two little girls in traditional costumes perform a short dance. They were terribly cute!

Then the band set up on stage while we all got ready for the color throwing countdown. We weren't thinking of the ill effects of standing downwind of the crowd. After a brief safety review by the man in charge of the temple, we started the countdown at 20. It took forever. But the band kept getting louder and people were letting out primal screams of eager anticipation and then "One!" and WE ALL THREW COLOR! It was incredible! All these shoots of brilliant color flew up in the air and then a dark brown cloud engulfed everything. We couldn't see the people standing next to us and we certainly couldn't breathe! You could feel it stuff your nostrils and crowd the back of your throat and stick down your throat and in between your throat and your nose. Darcy, Josh, and I came out all brown and Grace came out tan. But it was sincerely, most definitely, absolutely undeniably awe-some!