Nagarjuna Konda

So as many of you know we took off last Friday to fly up to Hyderabad to meet our BYU professor up there and spend the weekend there before travelling back to Bangalore together on Monday night.  so we bought our flights on expedia.com and they offered us a touring package to go out to see this buddhist island museum called Nagarjuna Konda.  we jumped on it and little did we know of the experience we would sign ourselves up for.  we left Hyderabad at 8am Saturday morning to embark on a three hour car ride.  luckily we had our own car but it did have five people in it:

but the whole car ride was definately worth it.  we even had a guide that would answer any question that we asked.  imangine that any question!  once we did make it to Nagajuna Sagar we found the docks so that we could get on our boat.  we first loaded onto a boat that was a pretty good size, thank goodness we got a top-level seat:

Hyderabad is much hotter than Bangalore.  in fact when you leave the city you have a higher risk of sun burn due to the little pollution that is outside the city.  it was a great boat ride though, slow but great.  The actual island is an interesting story.  so this lake exists due to a huge dam that was built for energy purposes for all of hyderabad.  when they built the dam they noticed that old ruins started to get uncovered by the absence of the water.  these ruins were really old but they decided to move them out to his island out in the middle of the lake to make an island museum of all these old buddhist artifacts and stupas.  i was only able to get pictures of the outside exhibits but here is a stupa:

Here are the five pillars of life: 

To refrain from taking life (non-violence towards sentient life forms)

To refrain from taking that which is not given (not committing theft)

To refrain from sensual (including sexual) misconduct

To refrain from lying (speaking truth always) 

To refrain from intoxicants which lead to loss of mindfulness (specifically, drugs and alcohol)

and why not a cool statue:

Something that i thought was really cool was this tree that they said was planted by the Dalai Lama himself:

The day was a very very hot day and by the end of the day at the museum most of us were ready to go home.  but driving home we saw this cool bridge that had be taken out by some floods from the dam and it was an amazing site:

the dam was also very beautiful with the sun:

another beautiful day in India