India - My Life within and without

Hope all of you are doing good and enjoying the summer weather. Over here in Mumbai, with March comes nice weather and HOLI, the festival of colors. In India it is known as the harvest and Spring festival. After a long time of staying indoors, people come out in the open and celebrate togetherness and happy moments while playing with colors. Normally GULAL, a type of color is made with natural ingredients like beetroot, leaves, etc... Gulal is normally safe but still we need to oil our hair and use baby oil for skin to save it from damages. Sometimes the colors are made from chemicals that could cause problems.

For Holi we (Snehal and me) like to go out of town with bunch of friends. Usually here are about 20 or so of us packed in cars.
Last year we went to Nagaon (a beach area outside of Mumbai) so this year we planned for Murund Janjira, a island which has beautiful, clean and virgin beaches. Early morning on 15th we packed our bags and left Mumbai while keep playing colors, throwing water on each other and dancing inside our cars. Everyone was fully colored and some were unrecognizable too(check out our pics). We had lots of trouble with our second car, the Scorpio (its tyre got flat 4 times, 1 time tyre busted and 1 time we lost the spare of it). But with Gods grace we all were safe and finally reached to Nagoan beach(same as last year, because we didn't wanted to risk taking the Scorpio any further) at 9 in the night. We all were tired and desperate to touch the sea so the moment we stopped, all ran towards sea. We stayed and played in water for another 2 hours and around 11 we all changed in to dry clothes at nearby cottages and left for Mumbai. We reached at 5 in the morning, after dropping some friends to their homes. Snehal and I came back to our lovely home and my cats were screaming for food. We were dying to sleep and with morning we came back to our normal routine of life. It took almost two days to get rid of color from our skin and hair. So this was our Holi in 2006. Now you all must be thinking why am telling all this to you? The reason is simple. Me and my husband Snehal are planning to go to USA for long time, which could be one to three years and am sure am going to miss the same kind of fun on festivals as India and as Holi is my favorite festival (I born on the day of Holi) I wanted to share my feelings with my near and dear ones.