Travel diary day four

Travel diary day four: so sad, it's my final day in San Jose. Although many parts of this trip I cannot say we're perfect today made it all worth it. Today was the large culmination of the conference with a parade and mela. The mela was basically like any festival except all Indian. There where booths, food, rides, music, it was pretty fun. Paz and I ran around spending all our money on Kurta tops and gifts for friends (they were priced well!) in the morning and then after the parade came back and handed out praasad or blessed food, and fliers for the temple. It was super hot out and we where both in half saris, which after wearing most of the day where sweaty and itched like nothing else, but it was fun because people kept telling us how nice we looked, and being modest is good, but sonars compliments! Anyway after feeding at least a hundred people sweets we walked around more, helped deconstruct the Pooja site from that morning and then went to the devotee's house that we stayed at at the beginning of the trip. Ok now that you know about the mela I have to turn back to the highlight, and hard point of the day. I have been in lots of parades. Honestly more then a can count and usually at the mention of the word parade I just want to crawl into a dark hole. But this one was so different. It consisted of all the missions, temples, and groups that participated in the conference. Each had their own float that they had worked on for the past two days. So in our section we had our gorgeous float, which turned out awesome, and then one group of dancers who had some choreographed things ready, a group of kids dressed as different gods, a huge poster for each Nithyananda temple across the US held by two people and then other devotees holding and waving flags. We had all our best Nithyananda dance music blasting out of speakers in the truck. Some very nice people kept giving us water and cocoanut juice. Overall it was just so fun and exactly like India. I was the main videographer for the event although at times I switched out to hold the Ohio Temple banner. I did take a lot of pictures though which I will upload soon. Now just hanging out. My flight leaves at 6:55 am tomorrow, so have to get up super early. So having a relaxing evening. Check back soon! For the sake of having a picture here is the beautiful courtyard of our hotel.