Day 69

Happy 1: Field trip! My Metro class and I went to Diwali, the Indian New Year celebration, held at Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. The whole experience was interesting. Our first stop was the "Shoe Station" where everyone had to remove their shoes and put them in a bag to be retrieved on our way out. The place was packed with a crazy amount of people; they told us that during the course of the day 25,000 people would be going through. Lucky for us, we had a tour guide. His name was Sitish (pronounced Sih-teesh), he spoke quietly but I learned a lot from what I could hear. The Mandir was beautiful and with incredibly intricate hand-carved wood and marble. Since everyone was sock-footed the marble floors were heated. Nice. Each year, the celebration has a theme and this year it was vegetarian(ism?). It's supposed to help you reflect and become inspired. Statues of their idol/god were everywhere and so were pictures of their spiritual leader/"inspirer." I was really uncomfortable and sad when I saw people bowing and praying to this non-god. On the way out, they gave us Indian sweets and a calendar with a picture of the inspirer. That's going up in the apartment, for sure.

Happy 2: My roommates finally returned from their travels to the Big Apple. While I enjoyed having the apartment to myself for a few days (in which time I cleaned the whole place, thank you very much), it is nice to have people to hang out with again.

Crappy: I never get sick. Never. However, I think I will be taking some NyQuil tonight...