Festival of Colors

Finally, all my dreams of attending the Hare Krishna festival of Colors have come to life. I have been trying to go to this festival for years and every year, my plans are thwarted. Every year, it gets bigger and bigger too. This year, they split the festival into two parts with the throwing of colors at noon and again at 4pm. They are looking for new ways to accommodate their 15,000+ guests. Apparently, the Spanish Fork Hare Krishna temple hosts the largest festival of colors in North America. Seriously, Spanish Fork? I guess that's believable with a campus full of crazy BYU students eager to welcome in spring with a massive dance party and bags full of dyed flour.

First of all, I want you to appreciate how squeaky clean we are in the above photo (and how excited we are to go to the festival), because the cleanliness didn't last long. Seconds after purchasing our colors, we tore open our bags and started hurling fistfuls of flour in each other's faces. (Note for next time. Wear sun glasses and try not to smile so much. Color in the eyes burns a little, and rose scented dye makes you gag when it's caked on your teeth.)

Sufficiently splattered, we boogied on down to the dance floor to celebrate. Fortunately, Hare Krishna hymns or mantras have only three words, so singing along is simple (see dancing clip below). At 5PM, they started the count down... from 20! Who starts a count down at 20? Somewhere around 10, a third of the people got too antsy holding bags of color in their hot little hands and smoke started to rise, but the festival veterans (not us, obviously, we used our color in the first 15 minutes) held strong till zero when a mushroom cloud of pink dust erupted into the air visible from 10 miles away. Inside the crowd, the sun was blocked out and everyone stumbled into one another breathing color into their lungs. Also at the final count down they burned an effigy of the demoness, Holika, who tried to burn babies (15,000 people boo together. Burn the demoness!) ... and then the band starts playing the dance party continues. Good times at the Hare Krishna temple!

This picture still doesn't do it justice. There were a LOT of people there.