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traditions, the Holi festival has also been commercialized, its date has been transferred to the summer, live music has been replaced by DJs and unknown bands performing with playback, and its name has been changed to Holi Peace festival, which is presented to you by Loop events.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.

The Baby-Sitters Club (aka Layra Went on a Ski Trip)

I don't know her. Yet she's certainly a horrible skier.

It was a bright cold day in January, and the clocks were striking nine. Nothing extraordinary in the eyes of the world, we weren't on the brink of dystopia, nor were we under omnipresent surveillance by superior forces. Something was about to change though, something unusual was about to happen...


...it was the first morning of the ski trip.


Now, if you happen to know me, you also happen to know that anyone including me and any kind of potentially dangerous winter sport in the same sentence is 1) either joking or 2) out of his mind. That is why I thought it was a good idea to disprove everybody's opinion of me and go straight ahead into a new adventure. Also, we all know how our Physics teacher organizes the trip and I really need that A this year. Plus I need a few more points on my '17 Things I did at 17' list. But that's irrelevant.

So, amid all possible Razzie nominated movies and direct-to-DVD Steven Seagal films, we took off on an eight hour trip to the not very snowy Gerlitzen, in Austria, an apparently well-known skiing place. Following some disasters from the previous years I've only heard of, we now got to stay at a house conveniently located between a police station and a fire department, which we all took as a thinly veiled warning. We didn't hear from the firefighters once, but we did read on Facebook (oh the technology!) one morning that two cops came knocking on the next door window the previous night. Yeah, it was a shame I missed that.


Anyway, back to the trip. The weeks before, I had successfully went around and knocked on the doors of my family members and friends, begging for ski equipment, so by the time of the trip, I could proudly state that the only things belonging to me were the very carefully selected and overpriced gloves. The skis belonged to my friend Liza, who now skied with her mom's skis, my clothes belonged to said mom, and the helmet and boots we rented. Nothing else was needed.
In the first moments of our first day, I was said to be the best and most talented. I gracefully slid down the slope that wasn't flat, just ALMOST flat. I felt like the swan queen from Swan Lake dancing eloquently while listening to the audience cheers. For five minutes, anyway, since by the end of our first day, I returned to my well-deserved 6th place on the 1-6 scale of 'Who's A Talented Skier'. I even ended up on the edge of a cliff. Erm...it didn't get any better and as the days went on, I continued being the worst, only having slight moments of joy when this other girl in our beginner group couldn't figure out how to turn and created quite a domino effect after pushing one girl over, and ended up stuck between the legs of another girl. She stayed there motionless for five minutes, then started to cry. Oh, the Schadefreude. I'm not going to repeat the beautiful words we all spoke while lying in the snow.

The good -this one only took two days to conquer.

The bad - this is the only one I conquered.

Yet my happiness didn't last long, as by the third day, I had also become an object of laughter. After two days, our dear Physics teacher/ski instructor deemed us capable of conquering the RED SLOPE. I reacted by sliding two meters, only to fall over and make the following fifty meters on my back, feet in the air, sliding upside down. It was only thanks to a lovely local man that I ever even came to a stop.

EXPECTED REACTION FROM EVERYONE: "Oh my Gosh, are you OK?"

EVERYONE'S REACTION: thumbs up and laughter


Funny, yes, I admit. However, by the time I was taking the chairlift DOWN into the valley, I was pretty much crying. Oh, yes, and I didn't even tell you about the time I fell out of this amazing chairlift, flat on my face.Of course, there were better moments of skiing too. Skiing with my friends, who didn't leave me behind or force me down RED SLOPES. Actually enjoying skiing down the blue slope I was afraid of the first day. Taking off the skis and sitting into a Hütte, where the food is great, and so is the music. All those Germknödeln and Käsespätzlen and pre-made pizzas...

The best slope. Mostly because of the view. And the misleading proximity to the peak.

The only downside was that all my friends could ski, and I couldn't, so every afternoon, a brave volunteer agreed to babysit me, and stay with me as I descend a flat slope in a square root 2 km/h speed. Hence the title of this post being 'The Babysitter's Club'. I even got to the point when I noticed how
two of my friends completely make me feel like I'm their daughter. Yeah, now I love these girls even more.
And also feel horrible about completely lacking the abilities needed to ski like a normal person.

Part of the crew.

The afternoons were also perfect. We were playing Rummy, which I can't actually play, singing the Cup Song, which I can't actually sing, watching Der Bachelor, which I would never actually watch, playing table soccer and table tennis with cardboard papers, hanging out with a seventh grader who knew lots of bad, bad, bad words (oh, the youth nowadays) and thinking about whether there is a word for laughing and crying at the same time. We ended up inventing one. Other than that we spent all our money on Vöslauer flavored water, but hey - it was 6 for the price of 3!

The trip was 6 days altogether, but the first day we spent with traveling. The last day there was an incredibly huge snowstorm, so I decided not to ski. Instead, I sat into a Hütte, bought a hot chocolate, and ended up being surrounded by ten Austrian guys, who didn't have a place to sit. I even had a nice conversation with (Layra language for "staring at") one of them, which was quite a nice way to end this trip. Except that right now, that one Austrian boy I talked to for five minutes is pretty much all I can recall about the ski trip. No, forget that, that one Austrian boy is pretty much all I can think about in general.
Yeah, but I digress. Ahem, Austrian boys. Ski trip was a wonderful adventure and as self-deprecating as I am, I enjoyed it and I don't regret going at all. I've met some great people, I've seen some breathtaking places, I could make people laugh by being the awful skier that I am, I've regained confidence in my taste in films and will also get an A in Physics. What else could I ask for?

Everybody. Some people more angry/freezing than others, due to being ordered

outside midst eating lunch.