Day 8 - in JagganathaPuri

Highlights from HG Radha Venkat prabhuji: 

Three things so far

1. Mangal arati at thotta (which means garden in oria - and also in Telgu and tamil !!) - left ashram at 5 and in 10 mins walk we were at the Temple.

Arati started late - but we had time to finish 8 or so rounds by then. Deities were dressed in very simple clothes

2. After breakfast prasadam we left for the main Temple. We also had 500 lollipops with us which we distributed. We had more than an hour long kirtan on the road where they park the carts for rath yatra - we also got the dharshan of pathitha pavan Jagannath (painting ? At the entrance)as many western devotees could not go it and we stayed as a group and so still no Jagannath dharshan after 30 hours of visiting the dham. 

3 Then we visited swtha ganga - a kund created by Lord Brahma - it was very nice and cool (compared to temperature elsewhere).

We have class in the evening between 4-6.

Some pictures from morning:

We manged to go the main Temple around 8:30 pm by auto rickshaw and back by 10. As prasadam offering was going on, we got a long distance view . Got to see their Lordship for over 10 minutes. 

Forgot to mention that prior to that we had prasadam from the temple served to us in our ashram (7 item dinner mahā prasadam !) Hope to get this through next 4 days !!

On Tuesday we plan to go to gambira - more details here http://www.iskcondesiretree.com/page/gambhira-1. But prior to that we might go to mangal arati at Gotta gopinath temple again (if I get at least one more devotee to go with).