Tenzin and I at the Buddha Purnima

 Tenzin is leaving on the 7th so he decided to drop in before that. I asked him if he wanted to hang around or do something else. Being a Buddhist he wanted to see the Buddha statue on the Hussain Sagar lake. I told him we could go. 

We found that the rides from the Eat Street side start at 4 pm and we were there by 1230 pm. One lady from Eat Street showed me a board saying - entry only if we make a bill of 50 bucks. She also told us to go to Lumbini Park which is where the boat rides begin. 

So we went and found that there is no Parking at Lumbini and we parked at NTR Gardens where we found an extremely hostile parking attendant, a girl. Then we walked to Lumbini Park and found that tickets were to be bought and bags deposited at cloak room. Here I found another intransigent and rude young boy who kept refusing the ten rupee notes I was giving him on one pretext or another. That done we finally made it into the Gardens and bought tickets to go to the Buddha. Luckily this ticket fellow was pleasant though he had some change issues. 

We were told to get into a boat and after two minutes asked to get into another. We shifted. I saw the board that said Life Jackets compulsory and wore it diligently and realised no one else was. I wonder why they don't - masks, helmets, life jackets, seat belts. Anyway we made it safely to the Buddha statue and took some pics. Tenzin was happy to see that the Dali Lama had inaugurated the statue. One man came and asked to take a picture with Tenzin and he obliged.

Job done, pics taken, we headed back. This time even I did not wear a life jacket. When in Rome, do as Romans.

We were thinking of where to go to eat and i had Mohini in my mind when I got a call from Chandu that he and Topper were meeting for beer at Yatri Nivas and would I care to join. I said we could join and we did. It was good meeting my pals from the Engineering College days and having a beer and some biryani (which kept the third b of our college idea of heaven out of the picture - babes). A nice afternoon and Tenzin took a nice pic of us as well.

Chandu, Tops and me

          And for comparison - a 1988 pic.

Top 3 - Sunil (red), me, Chandu (yellow)