A Visit To The Temple

I'd to just help my neighbour to find her run-away cat. Now a last blogbit... before I really really go to bed!

This Labor Day weekend I was thinking about spending 3 days in programming few stuff I'd planned but such things just can't happen. Suddenly a plan came around out of nowhere for 12+ hours of road trip to West Virginia and a visit to an ISKCON temple. Submitting to spontaneous weird idea seems to be my weakness. This one was weird because, well, who can think of visiting an ISKCON temple out of nowhere? While I'm not affiliated to ISKCON (or for that matter any religious organization whatsoever), I was curious about them anyway (watching Hare Krishna group dancing on Leicester Square in London is very cool) and so I joined my gang. This indeed turned out to be great road trip. We almost started at sun rise, passed through valleys and mountains covered with mist and made few stops. The temple located on the mountain top in hilly state of West Virginia has some good views. We also realized that day was little special being the last day of a festival called Paryushan from Jain religion and first day of another festival Ganesh Chaturthi and the last day when the temple remains open until 8 PM and a day when free feast is served and of course, it was the last day of summer. As if all these coincidences weren't enough, I ran in to one of my classmates in the temple who had left his job to be a full time ISKCON person serving as deputy director of a charity hospital (it's amazing how I keep meeting my classmates by coincidences. Last time I met one in a strip club, this time it was in a temple! And we always say this first to each other: "what the hack you doing here?"). We also took the tour of Palace Of Gold which is the memorial built for the founder of ISKCON. It's funny though to build a memorial buried under gold for a person who probably spent his entire life fighting against materialistic world and achieving nirvana.

You can view some photos of this trip, some are really cool including one with beatles procreating right inside the rose!