MayDay Parade

Explodes into Bloomington Avenue Downtown Minneapolis every year at the 1^st Sunday of May. Around 50,000 people join the parade which ends in Powderhorn Park followed by day long celebrations and Tree of Life Ceremony. For many in Minnesota, the MayDay Parade is a time to celebrate the coming warmth with hand-built puppets and masks (some over 10 feet tall), music, and performance in the street. In other words welcoming spring with music and celebrations.

It is organized by a popular group known as “In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre”. You can visit them on web @ HOBT.org. I knew this group from the Lantern Festival held in January and hence I was able to witness such a cool crowd of Minnesota. Sunday morning as usual, I visited my Church and afterwards one friend from Church joined me for parade. Although we reached there enough late, parade was already over, still there were celebrations going on inside powderhorn park. They had different kinds of dance-native American, belly dance etc.

The best thing about this event was you cannot only see it, but you can join them and dance, enjoy with them. I would like to give a special thanks to my friend who came with me and the organizing group-hobt.org. One more thing, I would like to add here is Lemonade, in US at least in Minnesota, its quite famous drink. Everyone is mad about it. There was a long queue just to get lemonade, although there were long queues for ATM and Ice cream, but that’s understandable.

There were stalls for all kind of food stuff, even there was a stall of Indian God and people were selling Ramayana/Mahabharata there. It was new for me. Then there was a fight between 2 gangs and in last it started raining. The most interesting part was it took us 15-20 minutes to search for our car on the way back. Serious problem in downtown areas. Then I dropped my friend at his place and came back. This was the first US parade experience and I must say, it was pretty cool.