Happy Diwali, Cantor Art Museum
I should have posted about this earlier, but better late than never. This past Thursday it was Diwali, the Indian ‘festival of lights’. This day is celebrated for a variety of reasons, one of which is to commemorate the return of Lord Ram back to the city of Ayodhya after he killed the demon-king Ravan and thus ended his 14 years of exile in the jungle. The townsfolk lit up rows of candles, from where Diwali (originally Deepawali) gets its name.
Anyway, it really came down to us getting some Indian food. My mom (best mom ever) sent me a care package with chakri (some of you might have tried those really really crunchy swirls of fried dough, remember?), sweet kuchori, and mithai (Indian sweets). So that was a great start. Amit and I hit up the farmer’s market then took a trip down to the Indian stronghold of the Bay Area — Sunnyvale.
We went to a large Indian grocery store and couldn’t believe that the tline stretched 3/4ths around the inside the store. Thankfully it wasn’t bad when we left. We got to some chaat before making it back. On Tuesday I popped in some small samosa and kuchori and brought it all and the mithai to Hindi class. A feast was only appropriate!
There is a bigger celebration planned for the weekend. In other random news, we had a tree fail occur on campus. A large branch broke off in front of the Moonbeams cafe. I snapped this on the way home from the library…about 4 or 5 bikes caught underneath that we fished out.
On Wednesday I had lunch with Sarah at the Cantor Art Museum cafe. Sarah is the Arts Program director at Stanford, and we met while stuck in Dulles earlier this summer. I never recounted the full tale here, but told many people separately. On my way back to Stanford before classes started, there was a fuel leak discovered as we were taxiing from Dulles and they canceled the flight. We sat on the runway as firetrucks surrounded the airplane and the pilot says that “the firemen don’t like the idea of a plane full of passengers sitting in a pool of jet fuel” so they got us off. The best part? As we were deplaning, the pilot says “and our thanks to the passenger who spotted the fuel leak,” [emphasis mine]. Yikes. Anyway, we were both standing in line waiting to get our new tickets and talking when it turned that she was an art program director at Stanford AND the one who spotted the fuel leak. We talked a bit about what is going on and Stanford and I had mentioned how it would be neat to see some data visualization projects. So we met for lunch to discuss some new ideas for projects at campus.
It was my first time really exploring the Cantor Art museum and it’s really quite nice. A lot of Rodin sculptures too, including the Gates of Hell partially inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
