In the summer of 2002 I joined with festival volunteers from 16 countries on the last three weeks of Indradyumna Swami's Festival of India Tour and sang and danced at one mammoth concert, and in five towns and on four beaches along Poland's Baltic coast. (If you want to see pictures from the 2003 Laksmi-Nrsimha Tour, click here.)

After the Woodstock festival, we spent two days cleaning up, and then on August 6, traveled by bus to Swierno in northwestern Poland where we resided out at a local school until August 22, the last day of the festival tour.

Because the members of the tour had worked continuous for so many weeks to put on festivals in Poland, we rested a couple of days to recover. Then each day we had our morning program, starting at 7 a.m., consisting of singing a couple of traditional devotional songs and hearing a lecture on the cream of India's Vedic knowledge known as Srimad Bhagavatam. This was followed at 8:30 a.m. by breakfast and by 10:00 a.m. we went singing and dancing on the streets and beaches of the town to advertise our festivals.

The day before, some of the ladies in the party had put up colorful posters around the town advertising the event. The color poster on the left is a general invitation and the one on the right tells the time and place of the particular festival. Actually although the poster mentions two days, this festival at Ustronie Morskie, which means "little quiet town by the sea", was extended to three, August 10-12. In twelve days, we did two 3-day festivals, two 2-day festivals, and one 1-day festival, and on the remaining day had our own farewell festival.

A team of about eight men and women would distribute thousands of flyers during the three-hour processions at the towns and on the beaches in the localities where we had festivals.

The ladies would lead our parties, wearing traditional saris, and the first four were usually decorated with flower crowns and gopi dots.

The men who led the singing and who played the instruments followed behind. In addition to the traditional Indian karatalas (hand cymbals) and mrdanga (two-headed drum), we had an accordion, an African djembe (one-headed drum), and a trumpet.

Sometimes as we passed by, singing and dancing, people looked out of their apartments windows and waved and smiled at us. Others stood at the edge of their patios and looked with curiosity.