One of our favorite Indian holidays was today, and we again made the most of it. Check out pictures from all the day’s activities over on the webpage.
While the red has come out of my eyes, the color is still all over my face, so I’m not sure what it will be like teaching the kiddies tomorrow! It’ll probably be quite ok, however, as I’m guessing that many of them will be sporting leftover tint as well!
Yes, it is Holi again, and just like last last year and the year before, once more we threw ourselves head first into this celebration of water and rebirth. We rounded up all sorts of non-toxic powders, and had a huge water and paint fight at Kiara, squirting everything that moved.
Following the morning battle, Alea and Dave ventured out into the neighborhood and got even more appropriately colored. The excitement on young kids’ faces was evident when they realized we were going to let ourselves get all colored up!
We finished off the afternoon at a colleague’s get-together, where we ate, drank, and soaked in the bright sunlight. My favorite Indian holiday! You can check out all the exciting pictures from hour day, now posted on the webpage…
Our honkin’ huge ASB Unplugged conference finished this evening, and we are ready to take a deep breath and relax. Things wrapped up after a nutso period of preparation and a crazy few days of people in and out and about and around and under and over and between and beyond and every other preposition your 7th grade teacher made you memorize. The number I heard this afternoon was that we had over 300 people from 64 countries visiting; I suppose you could peg it as a pretty darn successful event.
Susan and I presented a workshop about creating and posting videos online which was well received, we both opened up our classrooms to visitors to come in and interact with the kids,we each hosted a job alike for our respective fields, and we both set up “student showcases” involving them demonstrating and explaining the tech that we use on a daily basis (Alea was part of the demonstration crew for DyKnow), so I’d say the Stutz family was pretty darn well represented!
Add in social events on each night of the conference and a full few days of (usually) inspiring workshops, and we are wiped out. Luckily, Monday is the holiday of Holi, so we end up having 2 days off anyways. Playdates for the kids tomorrow and colored water the next day: prime elements of a rock and roll weekend!
We took full advantage of today’s colorful Holi festivities, setting up a water fight at home and traipsing around the neighborhood to catch a glimpse of India at its finest.
We missed a lot of the excitement last year, and so wanted to make sure we caught what all the fuss was about (and we did!).
All the pictures are over on our webpage, so pop on over and check them out!
Obviously a bit different than in years past!
While some things are pretty consistent from year to year (like my NCAA brackets falling apart before the end of the second round), our holiday patterns are wonderfully varied. This year we got to experience a true mashup of cultures, as a big Hindu celebration coincided with the Easter festivities.
Check out what was going on yesterday in the previous post (Holy Holi, Batman!) and then zip on over to the webpage to see other pictures from the weekend. We were just all over the place (and with Susan being a bit under the weather as well).
After all this, time to sigh in relief. One more week – a crazy week nonetheless with a big Festival of Nations celebration at the school – and then we are off to Kerala!!
What a rookie mistake. You’d think that after 38 years of life and more than 6 months in Mumbai I would have learned my lesson.
I made the number one error that expats living in India simply cannot afford to make: I left the house without a camera. Inexcusable, especially given that I knew it was a holiday, and a holiday that would be colorful and peopleful and photographableful.
Let me explain, if not excuse.
Today is Holi, an Indian holiday that is pretty much right in line with Easter (which is tomorrow). It is not like Easter in terms of Jesus being crucified and then coming back to life, but rather in the sense that it is built on the idea of an agricultural theme: death and rebirth and all that. Holi celebrates the coming of the spring season and the ‘recoloring’ of the countryside as plants sprout and grow. To celebrate the occasion, Indians spend the morning spraying each other with colored water, throwing water balloons filled with paint, and generally turning friends, acquaintances, and strangers into walking tie-dyes.
We – being a bit worried about some of the stories we’d heard about unsafe dyes and dangerous chemicals – decided to forgo the celebrations (and actually spent the morning engaging in our own, Western, take on the idea of paint celebrating the spring – we colored Easter eggs!). But this afternoon, Breck had been invited to a birthday party, so he and I had to head out in a rickshaw to “The Club” located in a suburb north of us.
Now Breck (and Alea) have been really funny lately about Susan and me taking pictures, and that is the only possible rationalization for what I did. I had everything all set up – battery charged, card cleared, bag packed – and then, like a total fool, decided not to bring the camera along. I didn’t forget it, I just didn’t bring it.
We went out, and before we even got into a rick, I realized that I had made a mistake of colossal proportions. People were all over the place, simply covered head to foot in pink, blue, purple, yellow, green, silver: every color imaginable. As we made our way north, we passed motorcycles full of painted families, rickshaws jammed with smiling kids, the streets teeming with colorful Indians. They would smile and wave at Breck and me, just happy to be out and about with the fresh paint dripping everywhere. And I had gone out without a camera.
By the time we got to the club, I was literally sick to my stomach. Not only had we passed incredible sights along the way, but I knew that I was stuck at the birthday party all afternoon: everything would be over by the time we got home. Talk about a wasted opportunity – unbelievable. I called Susan and managed to convince her to go out and take some pictures. She wasn’t too excited about doing so and so only went out around the block near our house (which is not a hotbed of activity by any means). But she did get a few shots, and those are what you see here.
I am glad that she did go out, and of course she tries to soothe my self-anger with, “Oh well, you can always take pictures next year.” Unfortunately, next year Holi is on Wednesday, a work day, not Saturday. I am simply disgusted with myself for going so far against my better judgment and letting such an almost once in a lifetime opportunity slip away. If you are in India on Holi, do not under any circumstances go out without your camera. You will hate yourself in the morning.
