Music, Dancing, BBQ, & Holi

The combination for a perfect weekend: listening to the Orchestra on Temple Square play Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, dancing at the MAC, eating at Tucanos, and getting into a colored chalk dust fight with 10,000 people! Yup, it was a good weekend.

Last week was honestly one of the best weekends I've had in a long time! Every day I was totally jazzed to do whatever I needed to get done... even if that was laundry. It's really great to be excited about life! And the weekend was the perfect capstone! Friday night I went to see the Orchestra on Temple Square as they performed, with other pieces, my favorite classical piece of all time! It was my first time hearing it performed live, and with the other pieces performed, made for a very emotional concert. After the concert, I met up with a few old friends at the MAC for a few hours of dancing and a trip to Leatherby's. Great night!

I slept in a little on Saturday and then drove down to Provo where Kimmy treated me to Tucanos, a Churrasco-style Brazilian Barbeque - all-you-can-eat BBQ meats and pineapple, capped with a creme brule! After successfully filling ourselves, we met up with my roommate Rachael and headed to the Krishna Temple to celebrate the Hindu Holi, or Festival of Colors. It took us about 45 minutes to drive down Main Street in Spanish Fork and find parking (which is a lot less time than it would have taken us to walk it...), but we found parking at a grocery store about 1/4 mile away from the Krishna Temple. As we came to the top of the hill, we realized that the throwing of the colors had officially begun!




We were excited to dive in and join in the festivities, so we documented our before picture and walked onto the temple grounds.


The Festival of Colors is celebrated on the full moon in the month of Phalgun Purnima, which falls usually in February or March. It is known in India as Boshonto Utsav, "Spring Festival". Krishna is a deity worshiped across many traditions in Hinduism and is believed to be an avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu, the supreme god. When younger, Krishna was often found in the company of Gopis, young cow-herd girls, his favorite and later his consort being Radha. The story goes that young Krishna, traditionally depicted in paintings with blue skin, complained to his mother about the difference between his skin and Radha's fair skin. To appease young Krishna, his mother applied color to Radha's face. The Hindu people carry on this tradition with colored paints, water, and chalk riddled with incense.


I didn't actually read this story until after I'd been to the festival. I wondered what the significance was of throwing the colors. I knew it was a celebration of spring, the season of love, but I wondered if there was something else significant. I thought that it was kind of neat to have everyone painted various colors, so that you could not really tell what their "natural" colors were - hair, skin, clothing - it all became coated by the colors, allowing in many ways for everyone to appear the same. For me, the festival will be remembered both as a celebration of spring as well as a celebration of us a people, with no differences and no distinctions.

Kimmy found a bag of blue powder on the ground, so we used that to join in the celebrations. As we walked through the crowd, different people would throw different colors on us. One guy made us laugh, essentially anointing us with "YELLOW ON YOUR HEAD" as we each walked by. At one point Rachael was trying to take a picture of the three of us when this guy walked past and threw a handful of purple right into our faces. Kimmy definitely took the brunt of the blow... and I was wearing my sunglasses...

After we left the dancing and multi-colored mosh pit, we wandered the temple grounds, visiting the llamas and zebus (cebus?).

After Pictures

After we visited the grocery store near where we parked and changed into some not so colorful clothing, we used my GPS on my phone to find an Arctic Circle for some sweet potato fries... My GPS led us to the Arctic Circle location in the picture below...

Kimmy said, "HAMBURGERS!!" and then we tracked down the next closest Arctic Circle... which was legit.