Trip to India - Entry 12 – Paani Nahin!

Arrival in Mumbai was entirely uneventful – the best kind of flight arrival. The ride to the hotel demonstrated how completely stir crazy all of us were getting. Paul and Vikas got into a tickling/wrestling match, Carlos was filming everyone with his camcorder topped with the crazy looking rat thing that I’m told has something to do with the sound, Becky was showing off her (actually quite impressive) guns, and the rest of us were either restlessly moving around in our seats or attempting to doze.

Mumbai’s colonial past is one of the most immediately apparent aspects of the city, after one gets past the immense length and size of the skyline. There are tall buildings yes, but there are a *lot* of buildings. Anyway, there are entire buildings that look as though they could simply have been plucked from some European city and dumped in their entirety here in Mumbai – minus the restoration efforts Europeans have put into their old buildings in the past thirty to forty years.

Upon arriving by air, one of the most visible items from the air is the vast quantities of blue tarps which are used to block the rain in the slums. There are a lot of slums. What I think is most odd about the slums is that some of them are actually made of brick. That is not what I think of when I think of slums.


On the bus to the hotel, we watched a number of Bollywood music videos – I can see where Shahrukh’s appeal lies – dude is seriously ripped. I can’t decide if it would be a blessing or a curse to have to constantly worry about my body as the currency of my career.

This evening we ate more delicious Indian food – the kind of food that tastes great going down, but you know will cause problems later…. Afterwards, we celebrated Carlos’ and Tara’s birthdays downstairs, but everyone was still lacking in energy, and the day was then done.