Last year, I noticed a slew of albums on Facebook containing pictures of people covered on colored powder. Since then, I was determined to become one of those people. So, this year, Grandma and I, with a couple of friends from around Wyview, trekked over to Spanish Fork to participate in the Festival of Colors. "What is this festival for?" you ask? Well, essentially, it's marking the end of winter and ushering in spring. An effigy of a witch is burned [presumably the witch of winter], then all those in attendance throw bags of colored powder at each other.
Having only heard about this last year, I didn't realize that this event was MASSIVELY popular. That being said, we thought that leaving at around 4:30 would get us there in ample time to participate in the color throwing at 5:40. WRONG. The traffic was absolutely monstrous not just because of all the excited BYU students going to the festival, but because of no less than three accidents that had happened on the way there.
Oh, and Grandma's car battery hiccuped on the freeway. It stopped for a minute before she turned the car off and on again. It was fine after that, but I thought for about two seconds that we were going to be the next accident slowing all the other cars down.
Once we finally got there and parked [about a mile away], it was 5:30. We started to book it, hoping against hope that we could still make it in time. However, at 5:40, a huge purple cloud wafted above the temple and we knew that the festivites had started. As we were still quite a ways away, Grandma, Heather, and I began to jog/pseudo-run the rest of the way. People driving past us tried to squash our enthusiasm by telling us that we'd missed it already, but we figured we could get some hugs from the colorful folk and still be sort of in on the fun.
By the time we made it, the majority of the colors had ceased being thrown. However, we totally lucked out, since there were people with surplus bags who spotted and said, "You're too clean!". In five minutes, we were all pretty coated in pink, yellow, and green. There was a concert-ish thing happening beneath the temple, so we decided to join the crowd. Delightfully, we received more colors upon our persons and enjoyed avoiding shoes as they were hurled through the air [no idea why].
After spending sufficient time getting colorful, we started to go back to the car. Tom, one of Heather's friends, was hunting for more color bags and spotted a man selling some on his car. He bought three bags and we covered ourselves yet again. We were pretty narsty [and by narsty, I mean awesome] by the time we got back to Vay-noos.
The ride home was a lot faster than the one there. However, we did pass the nastiest accident of the day--an SUV flipped. No one looked hurt, but it was crazy all the same. We made it back to Provo in one piece.
The rest of the evening consisted of watching parts of Victor Victoria [not a fan], BuyLow-ing, and Mao with various childrens from around Wyview. A rather fun evening, I reckon.
So basically, I love colors. I hope everyone had a great weekend!
