Holi Peace Festival

For those of you who haven't heard about the Holi, it's an ancient Hindu festival usually celebrated in the spring. It mainly involves people throwing colored powder on each other in the name of love. Now, as many other religious traditions, the Holi festival has also been commercialized, its date has been transferred to the summer, live music has been replaced by DJs and unknown bands performing with playback, and its name has been changed to Holi Peace festival, which is presented to you by Loop events. I see this as kind of sad.

Nevertheless, after hearing stories from friends and generally finding the concept intriguing, I decided to attend the very first Holi festival in Hungary. AND I DIDN'T REGRET IT. Honestly, despite all the things going awry in the beginning, I ended up having a wonderful night!

Wonderful. Night.

So, here we go:

After two of my friends cancelled on me, the third friend I asked said she would come, and that she'd also bring her sister. Great! Company! Everything fine until the day of the festival. Which was when

1) I left my ID at home, and had to go back, so
2) I missed my bus, so I only found out late that
3) my friends went to the wrong place and
4) it took a while for them to get there ("The office building! The one with the D on it! No, red bricks, not grey!"), so
5) we got in rather late.

Anyway, we did get in at last, so none of the previous turmoil actually matters. And what was inside was, well, quite a scene. Everyone - except for me, who couldn't open the packet of purple powder for half an hour - was throwing colors at each other, and jumping around and dancing, and trying really hard to look unrecognizable. It was only 6 PM, so there weren't any inappropriate naked impromptu performances yet, and no random people attempted to hug us a bit too tightly, and all was blissful.

I dare you to find me!

Except for the music. I don't know who was responsible for the music, but I want to strangle that person. I mean, they had Hungarian rap - which is well-known to be the worst kind of rap - and a couple of DJs I'd never heard of, and an apparently popular band with a really obscene name. And I know, I know I'm a bit of a music snob (a bit?) and I know it's unrealistic to expect indie music at such a festival and I know I have a bias against Hungarian music in general, but come on.

So after an hour, when everyone was already looking like Zoe Saldana in Avatar (which I proudly admit not to have seen) I was also among the group of people dancing to bad music, throwing purple power up in the air and being covered by green powder coming from fire extinguishers. And I thought, hey, this is so not how it's meant to go down, but hey, it's such a blast, so you know what, who cares?

If you saw a very colorful person wrapped in golden foil walking down the street Friday night, that could have been me.

You can find the official photos here, here , here and here.

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PS. The powder didn't come out of my hair. You know how I wanted to dye it purple? Well, this was not how it was supposed to go down.

PS 2. Not all photos are mine. Some are courtesy of my friend Szandi, others are official.

PS.3 If you couldn't find me...shame on you! I'm on the very left, right in the middle.