Reverse Winked at by a Crocodile...

This morning a awoke to the soft and calming sounds of chanting monks. Here at Pratheeba's house there is a shrine room, and every morning when I get up and go down for breakfast, the gentle sounds of chanting voices comes from the room.
After eating breakfast with Santosh and his friend (Pratheeba fasts every Thursday breakfast), Pratheeba and I left and drove into the city to The Snake Park. We spent about an hour walking around among the many different snakes, alligators, crocodiles, and other giant lizards that I don't know how to classify as. There were LOTS of crocodiles and alligators though, in one cage there was probably about fifteen of them! They were all sleeping around the water hole in the middle, and there was one sitting on a log that overhung the water, and he had his mouth wide open- baring all those hundreds of tiny sharp teeth!
We left the snake park and went to lunch at about 12:00 p.m. Since Pratheeba hadn't eaten breakfast, she was hungry early and so we had an early lunch! We went to a chain of restaurants called "Sangeetha" and both ordered our meals with freshly squeezed juice- sweet lime for her, and orange for me.
After finishing our lunch we went to an Institute of Technology where there was a planetarium. We saw the show in English, and both almost fell asleep under the dark night skies! It was a really cool show, and afterwards we went into the museum and checked out some of the exhibits. Some of them didn't work, but there were exhibits on transportation, development, and one about the ocean which was my favorite! The ocean exhibit was in an upstairs room, and when you walked in there was water running down glass plates and wooden walkways around the dark room. The signs were all lit very brightly, showing facts about tides, animals, underwater volcanoes, islands, etc. When we left the museum, we went outside and walked around for a few minutes inside a children's playground. Most of the toys didn't work, but there was some nice statues of a giraffe and a camel!
We then got back into the car and drove to another business park where we met Pratheeba's friend Arvind again for a snack. We had to get IDs to enter the gates, and inside there was a food court like in Santosh's complex, but here there were different options including McDonalds, Baskin Robins, Subway, and a few Indian food restaurants. We all had some ice-cream from Baskin Robins to cool down from the heat outside before Pratheeba and I left again to go to a temple near her home. This temple was called Nelangarai Shirdi Saibaba Temple, and it was beautiful! The grounds were quite a bit bigger than any of the other temples that I've been to while in India, and there were several buildings. The main was in a circular shape with a large dome on top. Inside was a statue of Saibaba, a saint that both Pratheeba and her mother like a lot. We made offerings of some yellow strings of flowers (Saibaba's favorite color) and then went down some stairs to a room below the statue where you could meditate. We sat for a few minutes and then left and walked around the grounds, along paths of cement and underneath a nice covering of trees. While walking around we came across "the wishing tree" where we both bought a few yellow strings and tied them around the trunk, each making a wish of our own. Pratheeba told me that I shouldn't tell what my wish was until it comes true, so I would write it in here, but I don't want bad karma! I'll write it in later when it comes true!
P.S. above is a photo of Pratheeba and I at the snake park (with an animal we both felt comfortable with!).