Holi: A Colorful Day for Tampere

On Saturday afternoon, people celebrated Holi, the Indian spring festival (also known as Festival of Colors), in Tampere's central square. The weather was quite gray and drab, but the mood grew with upbeat, world music and people and colorful paint.



Usually Holi is celebrated under the sun, with flowers and grass. In Finland, people threw snowballs instead of water.



People made signs reading "Hello" in various languages.



Federiko in the beginning. By the time we left, his entire face was covered.



We didn't plan on getting painted.



I guess she didn't either.



Cute kid







(Photos taken by Uzair and I)

The event was called "Holi for Equality," in an effort to provide a platform for intercultural interaction. From the event's Facebook page:

During this festival of Holi, one is smeared and dabbed with plethora of colors which makes it impossible to distinguish one by skin color, religion, country, gender, or belief. So, we have come up with this innovative idea of celebrating Holi to promote a common multicultural platform.

I think it was a great success!

More information: http://www.holifestival.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi

A video from last year's Holi celebration in Eugene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gRmpSnfrmI

In the evening, we headed to O'Connels in celebration of St. Patrick's day. We waited for nearly 30 minutes in the queue (just wanted to try the word out), and then entered the noisy, crowded pub with a live band and lots of green decorations. We met up with friends from Lapinkaari, who were hanging out at one side of a side room, opposite groups of Finnish people. Uz, Flo and I sat down on a couch, and a Finnish student began to speak with us. Topics included where we were from, where he has been, why we came to Finland, changes in the Nordic welfare state and the Finnish public media system versus America's commercial broadcasting system. I wasn't expecting to have such an interesting conversation at a pub on Saturday night.

Sunday has been mostly a reading day. I'm anticipating a super busy week ahead!