If You've Never Celebrated Holi Before...

If you've never celebrated Holi before... get on that. It's an Indian holiday that welcomes the spring and honors the victory of good over evil. Both are great reasons to party, no matter your cultural heritage. It's also known as the 'festival of colors,' aka the festival where you throw powdered paint at everyone within arms' reach. It's super fun.

This Holi party was at the local beach less than a mile from our house and consisted of maybe 100 friendly folks. Noticing our clean faces upon arrival, they kindly greeted us saying, "Happy Holi," and smeared the brightest paint imaginable on each of our faces. We all smiled (except Cosie who needed a little convincing).

When we got our own bags of powdered paint, our smiles grew even bigger. Then, we chased. We lunged. We dodged and danced in the sand. We were, indeed, going to get our new car terribly terribly colorful... We learned that the paint doesn't wash out of our skin/hair/clothes as well as we had thought--oops! But we just went with it, because: "hey, too late!"

The green was the most stubborn color to get out. Even with a few intense sand scrubs, we still looked like some sort of odd mix between Elphaba and a diseased Brady Bunch. Needless to say, we turned a lot of heads as we walked along the beach toward our car.

One local Chinese man stopped us, laughing, and asked what had happened to us. Unimpressed by my explanation, he looked at Meilin and said: 

"You look like one of those things in the movies... you know... an alien!"

We thanked him for his hilarious joke, and continued on our walk of shame.

Seriously though, we are so glad that Malaysia is culturally diverse, jam-packed with some of the coolest cultures in the world. This was in fact one of the main reasons we chose Penang as our new home. We may have different beliefs, but we can still embrace the good in all people.