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Published: March 16th 2010
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I was originally going to fill this entry with jealously inducing stories of palm fringed white beaches and the hassles of hawkers, but we stumbled upon something significantly more interesting.
While having lunch today we were warned of 'Colour' by a brit expat weirdo, he said 'Chapora takes no prisoners' and that they fill up water guns with this 'colour' and shoot down tourists. He said 'It's like they hate the colour of our skin or something'. We generally take advice from bitter wack jobs with a grain of salt - and it's a good thing we did!!!
But we were still a little apprehensive as all day long we would hear 'colour' in the middle of Konkani conversations and the street were eerily quiet. We decided after leaving the beach this morning (complete with shin sunburns) to hang out under our fan for a while. The sounds of hooting and shouting and singing and drums kept getting louder and louder until we decided to go check it out. Hundreds of people were parading by covered head to toe in neon colours! We decided to join in the fun and I had hot pink powder smeared on my cheeks
by a 4 year old girl and Brian was smeared purple by a little boy. We were invited to come parading and were promptly smeared with bright yellow and orange and green and every colour and then fit into the crowd of 500 neon Indians. The main streets were filled with all this wonderful chaos when a parade consisting of the colour smearing participants began and we became part of it. We followed the drums to the dock and watched as they poured feni (distilled from cashew or coconut) and whiskey on a large tree (fo' the homies!) and then the parade headed for the beach. We were handed a bottle of feni that we could not give away, noone would even drink from it. Some of the Indians were drinking, but Hindus really don't drink very much and certainly not hard liquor.
At the beach there were snacks poured into the hands of everyone attending, a mix of peanuts, lentils, fried vermicilli. Because of the nuts I ate Brian's share, a lot! There were people walking around the beach dumping liquor into whomever would take it's mouths. Every suddenly ran to tarps covered in sliced sugar cane. We
walked over and a young man handed both of us a piece of sugar cane. He told us to throw it into the ocean with all of our demons and wash off all the colours and that we would come out new. So we joined everyone on the shores and washed as much colour as possible. (which ended up being not alot ... we were so completely coloured!)
After that the procession went to the temple where we found a seat on the edge and watched as they uncovered giant baskets of sweets!! They chanted and sang a bit and then passed out giant handfulls to everyone in the crowd. It seemed like everyone had a little plastic bag for their sweets but me, but someone near by gave me one and we were given a giant handful of sweets!
I've been informed the cafe is closing up so no pictures today. We didn't get pics of the crowds (tourists cameras were getting pretty covered with colour powder) but we have some of us all covered.
Take care and have an auspicious day!
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sarah
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wow that made me giggle cause it almost sounds too fun to be real. I think a friend of mine came across this parade when he was in India too!