Facebook, in my opinion, has become a little presumptuous with their advertising and recommendation of pages... I'm not entirely sure which of my activities they've been tracking that they now find it necessary to promote 'Whiskers Germany' and 'Cat Playhouse' or something on my page... I'm not THAT obvious about the CrazyCatLady thing right??

But they did well with recommending the Holi festival- which popped up in the sidebar of my newsfeed a few months back.

The Holi Festival was started in Berlin only last year, in an imitation of the colour festivals of India. There's live music- mostly electric- and lots of throwing around of paint powder. The experience is supposed to celebrate not only the coming of spring, but also the colours and joy of life, and, I guess by 'painting them all green in the sunshine', eliminate personal differences of wealth, class, colour and so on. (If you want to know more you can read/googletranslate about the history here: http://www.holifestival.com/wie-es-begann/).

Andy, my cousin Ashleigh, and I, headed out at about 3 pm, followed the mass of white-wearing people to the old Olympic Stadium.

We then spent a happy afternoon/evening frolicking in the sun, listening to music, eating wurst, chasing each other down with colour-attacks and, every hour on-the-hour, joining in in the creation of a massive mushroom cloud of colour with the thousands of other people there.

I think I'm going to let the pictures pretty much do the talking from here on out. For those of you who don't like picture heavy posts, and get bored by multiple photos of the same people, you might want to gracefully exit here- it's pretty much a progression of the three of us getting more and more colourful, plus a few bonus shots of powder throwing, nuclear-esque dust clouds and other bright and shiny things/people I could point a lens at.

And so our tale begins, with the first coordinated colour throw: which we watched from the sidelines, and with three fairly clean looking, white-wearing people... who very rapidly got colourful.

I feel lazy today, and not in a very write-y mood. In my defence, I just spend 2 days (16+ hours) in a 'professional presence' workshop, learning how to express myself verbally in front of large audience. I think it has killed, or at least momentarily stunned, my Mojo.

But I do want to say: the colours festival was cool! It was one of those Bucket-listy things that I think you should try, even if you don't immediately recognise it as something that you'd like to do. 

Personally, I'm not so into electronic-y "music", and, as anyone who's known me for more than 10 minutes will know, I rapidly panic if my hands become dry and powdery (thus the omnipresent tub of hand cream). I also have lung problems, and I'll admit that the moment when everything went black as the colourpowder blotted out the sun was probably not the most comfortable I've felt in my life.

But on the other hand, I love colour. And I really love throwing things. And this was so different and chaotic and joyful. So if you think you're someone who can approach spending the next week blowing pink stuff out of your nose as 'a little bit of excitement added to an otherwise boring task', I'd recommend you try this out at least once. If you're in Perth, I can recommend a somewhat similar, but much stickier alternative happening at the end of the year- the Throwing of the Grape. Check it out.