Nilesh’s Posterous

Does anyone know what the moon festival celebrate?

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Every month, the city of San Francisco organizes Sunday Streets (http://sundaystreetssf.com/)  in one neighborhood, where they close off the streets and people can just enjoy walking, biking on the streets in 'safer' environment (intro from website :: Sunday Streets creates a safe, fun, car-free place for people to get out and get active in San Francisco neighborhoods.) They also have many activities planned on the streets by different group, free bike rentals, roller skates rentals etc.. pretty fun. This week they had it in the mission district (http://sundaystreetssf.com/?page_id=474). It was awesome. Enjoyed it a lot and disovered many new places in the mission, in places i rarely ventured. After SF streets, we went to Dolores park to a huge crowd, where the SF symphony orchestra was playing for free. Annie had planned a potluck picnic where it was great to meet up and spend the sunday afternoon in great company and great food !

                     

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Yesterday evening, I went to the Fire Arts Festival at the Crucible in Oakland. Lots of fire arts on display, huge structures and sculptures built out of scrap metal. Apart from the sculptures and fire arts, they also had a main stage with various shows with fire and shadows. The main show was an opera - the rootabago opera.

Unfortunately, I did not bring a lot of warm clothes and was very very cold and shivering and had to leave early and missed out on the last few shows.

It's still on till Saturday if you wish to go. Tickets etc.. here ->>http://thecrucible.org/events/fire-arts-festival/157

               

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I attended Maker Faire for the first time this year. It is the biggest science fair for Adults. All kind of inventors, scientists, etc.. were there showcasing their stuff and all so passinate about it all.

Lots of interesting new things in all areas. I was pretty impressed by the 3D printing though. Its so neat to be able to just design something on 3D and get it created by simply printing in 3D.

Loved the Robotics, Fire Arts, DIY booths, Electrostatic/Electric demos, Computer Music section and the general crowd.

                     

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Again this year, the Carnival was a blast and I went both days - Saturday and Sunday, even though it was very cold. On Saturday, met Ken, Amalee, Greg, Laura, Levi and the kids and on Sunday, was with Levi, Amy and Belden. The cold sure did make the crowd a little bit less, but that did not make the fun less though. I think its among the best street parties in SF !

Check out some pics from it !!

                 

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Last weekend, I did the bay2breakers race again with a few friends. We deciced to be scrabble letters. We bought some plain white t-shirts and had drawn scrabble pieces and their points on it, hoping we'd make words with ourselves along the way, but we did not :) Was much more interesting to watch the other people. Weather was extremely hot that day, but did not prevent any of the crazy people to enjoy the race. The race had its usual quota of naked people, body painted people, huge drink floats, theme floats etc.. Check out the pics for some moments from it.

             

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From Friday to Sunday, there was an Short Film Festival in Mauritius. All showings were free and open to the public. Great initiative by the Centre Culturel Charles Baudelaire (http://www.ccb.intnet.mu/).

I did not have a chance to go any showings except for the Sunday Showing. The Sunday night showing was at ABC theatre, Rose Hill and it was solely for Mauritian movies/productions. As it was free, I thought it would have been very packed, but there were many open seats. I guess either people did not know about it or people are not too interested in that kind of stuff here.

They had a great selection of short films by mauritian producers - 8 movies in total, some as long as 30 minutes and some as short as 10 minutes. All the movies were in either French or Creole. I enjoyed them a lot.

The one I loved the most was the cartoon 'The Adventures of TiKoulou' (http://tikoulou.com/). Very colorful and professionally made and great story too to showcase Mauritius to the younger crowds.

They all had great photography, great camera work and good acting, BUT the stories were a little weak.

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Apart from sharing sweets and cakes to loved ones, for Divali, we also light up our houses to welcome goddess Laxmi.

Even though we are not celebrating this year, we did some prayers to Goddess Laxmi (picture 2) and put some earth lamps (picture 1) in every room in the house.

Quoted from wikipedia about significance of the lights - "Festival of Lights," where the lights or lamps signify victory of good over the evil within every human being."

Last year, my dad had decorated our house a lot with many decorations, the most he had ever done on the house. I've attached some pictures of my house (picture 3 and 4) decorated for Divali the year before.

       

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Divali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali) is celebrated today in Mauritius and everybody cooks sweets and cakes that they share with all family, friends and neighbors. This year, I am not celebrating as it has not yet been 1 year since my father's passing away and we mourn for 1 year.

But we did get a fair share of sweets from family and friends and neighbors. I have not celebrated divali for a while in Mauritius and biggest change I see are that the cakes are very much more elaborate than they used to be and also people have started to use fancy decorated boxes to put the cakes in rather the little plastic or paper bags, we used to use when I was a kid. I've taken snaps of a couple of the boxes. They have very nice designs.

One thing that has not changed though is the traditional 'gato patate'. Its a cake made of sweet potatoes, flour, sugar and grated coconut filling and has been a traditional cake to cook for Divali. Mostly everybody had a 'gato patate' in their sweet bag.

For my Mauritian friends who are not in Mauritius at this time of the year, I've taken some pictures of what you are missing :)

I over indulged on the sweets today. Tomorrow diet starts :)

           

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