Joe Holzka Community Garden and Buddhist Viarha

Roar! Today I rode my bike out to Staten Island to visit a couple more Key to the City Locations. First I headed over to the Joe Holzka Community Garden and then I rode to the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara.

Here I am outside of the Joe Holza Community Garden. It looks pretty nice! Let's go inside and check it out!

Roar! It sure is nice in here! The site for this garden used to be the old Plaza Casino. After it burned down the lot remained vacant for years until they established the sweet garden here.

My key opened the gate to the this sweet gazebo in the garden. It sure was nice and shady inside. This would be a pretty cool place to come and hang out if I actually lived anywhere near here.

There was also this mystery box on the table inside of the Gazebo. It had all these sweet oragami pieces inside of it! I decided to leave a few stickers for the next visitors to Gazebo. I hope they like it! Roar!

I took this neat looking paper hat to give to Giraffe. I wonder what she'll think of it?

Roar! The Joe Holzka Community Garden was pretty cool! I wonder what awaits me at the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara?

Here I am in front of the Vihara. It's a pretty neat looking place. It turns out this is the only Sri Lankan Buddhist center in the city.

My key opened this gate to the back garden. Back there they had an actual Bodhi tree growig in a pot! Bodhi trees arn't suited to our climate and the monks told me they needed to take it inside during the winter! Roar!

Inside the center they had all these really pretty lotus blossom lamps hanging from the ceiling. They also had this really awesome Buddha statue I got to meditate in front of. The monks at the center were all super friendly and said it was really nice to have a T-Rex come to visit the center. As a dinosaur I really like a bunch of the ideas in Buddhsim, particularly the stuff about impermanence, but I sure would make a terrible Buddhist seeing how much I like meat!

I threw up a sticker on the sign at the end of the street across from the Vihara. It sure was a lot of fun to come out here to Staten Island and check out these couple places. I bet there is a lot more to discover out here! Maybe next time I'll bring Giraffe along with me. Roar!