Diwali on the U of I Quad

Back when I was in my first year at U of I, I had heard that lanterns got lit on the quad for Diwali and had seen pictures around the internet of it and thought that it would be cool to photograph.  Every subsequent year on campus I would hear about it the day after, or find out a hour or two after it was over, never getting the chance to take pictures.  Obviously I do not celebrate the holiday myself which makes it hard to remember to figure out when it is.  This year however, I stumbled across someone posting the event on Facebook a week before the event was to take place.  I quickly put a reminder in my phone because I knew I'd forget, and sure enough I did.  Monday rolled around and on my way home from work it dinged, which confused me.  After pulling it out of my pocket I read that reminder I had put there, finally I had remembered ahead of time!  After a quick dinner at home I went to the quad to watch the lanterns start to get put out on the quad...which turns out to be quite a long process.  Since I had a quiz the next day I had to get some studying done, so I headed into the union.  As I didn't want to miss the event after coming so close in the past, I pulled up the quad web cam and watched the progress in the browser window between readings while tucked in a quiet section of the union.  One hour later I deemed the lantern laying process sufficient and made my way out to take some pictures.  While the entire quad did not get lit up, a large percentage of it did and I was able to grab some fun pictures of the celebration.  So after years of trying to remember and show up to the event, I finally have some pictures to show you.  I hope they were worth the wait!This work by JD Maloney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.