HOLI Fest 2012 Spanish Fork, Utah

Saturday March 24, 2012 we went to the Holi fest… which is also known as the festival of colors!

The Festival of Colors, also known as Holi, is two days of thousands of people gathered on the hill of the Krishna temple throwing brightly colored powder, participating in holy mantra and dancing to live music and bands.. Holi, the largest Indian festival, is held on the first weekend of spring to celebrate the beginning of the season. Colored and perfumed powders are thrown at each other and in the air to celebrate the new season!

Holi marks the end of the winter gloom and rejoices in the bloom of the spring time.

While at the festival we ate some traditional Indian food… vegetable curries, Basmati rice, Dahl — spiced bean soups, papa-dams and mango juice. I can’t say it was the best food I ever tasted, but we ate it anyway because we had to stand in line FOREVER to get it!

My personal review of the festival:

We were really excited to go! We parked and rode the bus 3 miles to the Temple. Upon getting there we walked about 1/2 a mile to the temple. We had pre-paid, but we still had to wait in a MASSIVE line of people to filter through the bottle-neck type gates. Once inside the gates we made our way to the back of the temple to get our meal tickets, shirts and our 10 bags of COLOR! The crowds were unbelievable!  There were times we were in a powder coated blob that did not move no matter how hard we tried.  We got our items and made our way out of the tight crowd. We got our food after a very long wait in line. The food was not good. We all ate it because we were starving, but I would NEVER willingly eat it again! After “lunch” we moved to a “less crowded” area on the hill and opened our bags of color. We let the boys throw them on each other, us and innocent bystanders! They LOVED that part! Shortly after we made the trek back to the bus and waited another long amount of time to go home.

The verdict:

I MIGHT go again… IF it were at a different venue and there were not 80,000 people who are mostly crazy, rude and disrespectful college students!  The good part is the boys got to do something they never get to do… go crazy and throw things at people! They loved it, but I think I will leave this event to the college kids.