Our first meeting in Warsaw brought us to a Vietnamese Buddhist temple. As the congregation of the City of Thousand Buddhas from California was assembled, we were running in and the monks recited a powerful mantric blessing for us to carry with the torch throughout the world.

Our next appointment was a public Yoga session in a park. Approximately 200 people gathered there and practised Yoga together. We arrived at the end of their program and presented the Run.

After passing the torch around, the event ended with a very relaxing symbolic lap for harmony!

Meanwhile a TV crew arrived, and made us run and sing!

The program today was extremely colourful, as our next meeting also proved to be. We visited the ISKCON - Hare Krishna Temple in Warsaw, where a special ceremony was taking place as we arrived.

Happily, they integrated our international team into their prayers and singing and as it is the tradition when you visit a temple, we ended the event by running all together, three times around the temple.

A hard day in the life of a photographer...

In the early afternoon we started to run out of Warsaw. In Legionowo we met old friends from a former run. A huge group of runners greeted us and joined us for a few kilometres.

The mayor received the torch and ran with it.

Just before we arrived Pultusk it started raining cats and dogs, but the warm summer rain was more like a welcome shower.

Because we were in a hurry we did fast one-kilometre splits, but as we arrived on time at the city hall nobody was there! Everybody took shelter because of the heavy rain.

Soon we "discovered" the meeting party and we presented the torch. All of us were totally soaked! While we enjoyed great refreshments and snacks and slowly dried off, we got the message that many kids had arrived.

It was a big surprise for us when we walked out of the city hall and found ourselves surrounded by 250 kids!

Many of them where Russian kids from the Lake Baikal region, who were enjoying summer holidays in Poland.

Fortunately we have two Russian girls on the team right now, so we presented the run and then a dynamic run around the huge square of Pultusk made our day!

Twenty kilometres out of Ostroleka, runners from one of the best Marathon Clubs in Poland waited for us. Together we carried the torch to the city and finished for the day at our accommodation place, as the reception here is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

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Distance: 86km

Team Members:
Dipavajan Renner, Sandra Aurenhammer and Martin Prettenhofer (Austria), Anita Borics (Hungary), Roger Rogge and Sonja Chatterjee (Germany), Monika Lopez de Nilkens (Mexico), Roos de Waart (Netherlands), Sandro Zincarini (Italy), Jarek Werner (Poland), Ksenia and Daria Soboleva (Russian Fed.)

Harmonemail:
You can send a message to the runners or read the messages.

Gallery: See more images!

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