About a week so far in Mumbai
I've tried to figure out what it is about this place that I specifically find to be so overwhelmingly intense.
I think the honking is a big factor. Rarely do let's say 3-5 seconds go by that I do not hear a car honk. Usually it is a chorus of honks. I've tried to listen to them as music instead. When they are off in the distance or when I'm indoors and they are not quite so loud, it's manageable, but often walking in the street that's not the case. Normally they are so loud as to make you want to cover your ears. I'm one of those people who covers their ears when an ambulance or something goes by. I know too many people from music school with ringing in their ears, and having had that for a day or two after loud concerts, I definitely don't want it for the rest of my life. That said, you can't really prepare yourself for it here, such that I would worry that if I stayed here for months or a year or something, it'd only be a matter of time before I'd have hearing damage. I wonder how many people already do.
So the honking makes up some huge bulk of the noise. Of course there is the engine and people noise as well which contributes. There are also the smells. Car or bus exhaust, pollution, stagnant water, garbage, unknown smells of human origin. Those are the bad ones. There are some good ones too, like the incense that a lot of vendors burn to keep flies away from their food. Then occasionally there's the food and spices, but I find it usually gets drowned out by the other smells.
The constant staring doesn't help anything. You'd think after China I'd be used to it, but I guess not being able to shock them out of it by speaking the local language doesn't help. Also, people do tout things quite a lot, most commonly little tourist souvenirs, toy drums, bootleg dvds, or knockoff merchandise, even more so in this neighborhood or near anything remotely touristy, though since I walk without a backpack or anything and I have gotten better at ignoring them completely, they often don't bother approaching me anymore, so that's been better the last few days.
Maybe most of all, here in India like in China, personal space doesn't really exist the same way. So people are constantly passing right near you, standing practically on top of you, bumping into you, touching you, spitting right next to you, shoving and pushing into each other to get in and out of places, passing directly in front of you if you're waiting for something or standing on line, and whatever other kind of offense you can imagine. At the restaurant waiters or customers are always putting their hands on the table or the chair as they pass by to support themselves. They also tend to stack things up on unused parts of the table like extra menus or whatever. Since you're often (at the budget places anyway) sitting at a table with people you don't know, this is hardly a surprise.
Did I mention about the guy sitting in front of me on the train? We were sitting knee to knee on a train, shoved between people. This guy first goes digging into his nose past the second knuckle, no shame at all. Flips the findings onto the floor in what is supposed to be a subtle gesture I think, then pulls out a handkerchief/rag. A lot of Indian men carry these around to wipe sweat off of their faces during the day. This guy is a business man by the way in a nice enough business shirt, tucked in, gold watch, etc. So it's probably 100 degrees on the train, and this guy goes and sticks his rag into his armpits one by one, taking a good 5-10 seconds to soak everything up, then takes the rag out, folds it once, and wipes off his face. I'll let that sink in. The guy next to him had a pack of some kind of tube-like chips. He bites the plastic to open it, then spits out the plastic and it lands on the guy in front of him. Neither react. When he's done, he throws the plastic out the window. There are very few garbage cans around the city in general. They most often are found near a food stall of some kind, but most of the time people just throw their trash on the ground. I guess this is similar to a lot of countries I've visited in Asia, and of course we have assholes who do this in the States too.
Anyway, that's a smattering of things which occurred to me. As far as my activities go...
Sunday I took a local train by myself up to Kandivali East where Shweta lives, then walked a few minutes to the local bus station and took a local bus out to her area, about 15 minutes away from there. I think not speaking the language is part of what makes everything feel so different to me than China. I've just become used to being able to communicate comfortable. Of course there are differences, but at least part of what makes it feel so exotic is not being able to communicate effectively and thus feeling myself to be even more of an outsider. Shweta's suburb was much quieter once I got away from the train/bus station area. You can walk through the streets without encountering much traffic, although there are people walking around of course. There was a giant field where lots of young folks were playing cricket. We went up to her place and her Mom cooked me a delicious home-cooked Indian lunch. We sat and talked for a long time both before and after. For those who don't know, Shweta and her Mom and I met through Couchsurfing. They came to New York almost 5 years ago exactly and stayed with me just before my own long trip to China. Now 5 years later I'm sitting with them on the floor eating lunch in suburban Mumbai. Incidentally, I've eaten certain Indian foods with my hands, but pretty much always bread or dosa which I then used to scoop up whatever. This was the first time I ate rice with my hands. It's one thing to fold up some bread and scoop, but I felt like each time I made an attempt with the rice and dal (lentils) mixture, I ended up getting more and more on my face. I was proud of the attempt regardless. For the curious, the meal was roasted papad which she cooked directly on the gas burner of the stovetop, a delicious cabbage dish that I wish I could get in NYC, roti, rice, dal, and then a bunch of other items at least one of which was a spinach dish of some kind and the others I am not sure. All around delicious to be sure.
Shweta and her friend Shrestha then took me for a walk around the area to a nearby temple where I could stare at fish or be stared at like a fish, whichever I preferred. I chose both. Next came an auto-rickshaw ride to the mall, which provided an opportunity to see something insanely out of place. The mall was basically a western-style mall with lots of upscale shops, all clean and new, the only real difference being more vegetarian food in the food court. Subway had some kind of potato patty sandwich which looked kinda good, though I don't think I'd be brave enough to just have raw lettuce & tomato on a sandwich here no matter where it came from. Also the separate security booth for women to be wanded over with a metal detector is something you don't see in the states. In fact, I think most malls still don't make every customer pass through metal detectors. We reserve that mostly for our public schools. We walked around the mall, really only stopping so I could try to play the drumming game in the arcade which turned out to be all Japanese music anyway. Shweta and Shrestha played a game of air hockey. Oh yes, I also played whack a mole, the basketball game where the hoop is too small, and some other game where I hit things. I had to use up the credit I was forced to buy to play the Japanese drumming game in the first place. After the mall, we wandered next door to an upscale supermarket. This was kind of like a Walmart I think. Downstairs was all food, kind of like a big Walmart or any supermarket I suppose. They had a huge selection of produce and interesting products, both imported and domestic. It reminded me a lot of Whole Foods actually. Upstairs was kind of like K-Mart. They had bikes, appliances, computers, dishware, and basically everything else you can imagine.
After this, I headed back on the local train to South Mumbai where I am staying. That train trip is something like an hour but it goes fast since there is so much to look at on the way. I have since taken the train a few times, though that day was really my first. You can hang out of the train like in the movies. I haven't ridden it during rush hour, though I did arrive back in the south around the time the rush hour was beginning such that there were large throngs of people waiting at the Churchgate station trying to hop onto the train before it stopped moving such to secure themselves seats before the train stopped and everybody had a chance to get on. This is apparently common practice and to get on and off effectively, you pretty much have to do it before the train stops moving. I was proud of my dismount in which I didn't knock anybody over or fall over myself. Apparently when things get really busy people are known to ride on top of the trains, but I haven't seen this yet though I would love too. The ones I have ridden on are electric, so I'm not sure riding on top near the cables is a great idea, but I'd still like to see. The trains here are apparently safer than they were. When you arrive at an outlying station, there are now walls preventing people (sort of) from walking in every direction across the tracks to get where they want to go. I did see a lot of people going through fences and doing this anyway, but apparently not too many years ago, this was all just open and it was quite common for people to get hit by trains when crossing the tracks. Several friends from Mumbai have told me they have seen people hit and seen bodies laying next to the tracks after being hit. I know people jump in front of the NYC subway on purpose once in a while, or have a seizure like that one guy, but seeing bodies lined up next to train tracks is pretty freakin' intense. So at least some newer safety measures have since been introduced making it necessary to duck under a broken fence to get hit by a train instead.
So that's only the end of my second day in Mumbai. I have often said "never a dull moment" but in Mumbai there seriously is *never* a dull moment. Even laying on the bed in my hotel room I can hear tons of yelling and noise and honking coming from the street just outside. As I type this, I'm in a friend's office which is blissfully quiet. It's on a side street and the office is in an interior part of the building away from the street noise. It's actually an amazing difference.
So a few other highlights as long as I have access to this computer for a bit...
I went to a CS meetup on one night and met about 15 or so local Couchsurfers. Mostly men as I have heard the Mumbai CS group can be a little prone to guys trying to pick up girls which is too bad. There was one girl from Poland who came with her travel-buddy from Scotland. He had been in the European equivalent of the Peace Corps and lived in rural Rwanda for 2.5 years. That was quite a story. He spoke the local language quite well apparently and I think that must be one of the most awesome things to bust out on the presumably rare occasions you run into people from Rwanda. I asked him if he had, and on the trip even he had found a few African folks who happened to be from Rwanda and when he approached them and spoke their native language, well you can imagine it must have been mind-blowing for them. I mean, how many non-Rwandans in the world even know that language? Very cool. Another Indian guy lived in Madagascar and then Tanzania for two years each. He had gone initially to work on a documentary I think to promote tourism in Madagascar which had been finished relatively quickly, but then he stayed and "just had a ball of a time" for the rest of his stay. There were a few other non-Indians. One guy was from France who came over and said something like, "I heard you have spent some time in China" or something like that so we got to talking about it and turns out he lived in Wuhan for two years so I immediately responded in Chinese, "So you can speak Chinese then?" And I think we were both equally surprised and happy to find someone else with whom to practice. He is now living in Mumbai working I think on automobile design of some kind and has been here for about three months.
So that discussion of China spread to the guy next to me who is Indian who is studying Mandarin and has just began. He works with an organization in India run by a Chinese girl and an Indian girl who had previously lived in China. I ended up meeting up with that guy last night and with his friend who are both in the Chinese class, and helped them since I'm a bit farther along in my own study. They put me on the phone with the Indian girl who co-runs the school and on Sunday I'm going to drop by and sit in on the class then join them for dinner next week. I love doing stuff like that and everybody I have talked about here has been really nice. The original student who I met at the CS meetup is named Mulchand and he invited me to dinner after our Chinese chat. We went to a great place which I never would've guessed exist as it was very run-down looking from the outside and inside as well actually, but after emerging on the 7th floor or so which was actually the roof, we came out into a beautiful covered rooftop filled with cabana-type structures, comfortable chairs and couches, nice lighting, sand on the floors, and in general the sort of place I might expect to find in Miami or something. From there we enjoyed a beautiful view of the southern Mumbai coastline and one of the more delicious meals I have had on this trip which consisted of the best vegetable biryani I have ever had and something called a papadam roll which defies description but is basically some sort of mashed and spiced vegetables inside a rolled and slightly soft papad. Also for dessert we ordered something called Jelabi. I may be spelling that wrong. I ordinarily can't enjoy Indian desserts as they contain dairy, but this was just a sweet sugary sort of candy consistency which I will have to work hard to hunt down in the US upon my return.
Mulchand also invited me to join his photography group on a trip to a nearby "hill station" which is a small town in the countryside called Matheran. That trip starts tomorrow by catching a 5:45am train several hours southwest of the city. I really want to go and it is my plan not to miss it, though my stomach has been gurgling a little but I will try not to let that stop me. The train is only a few hours so it's not that big of a deal and I really want to see some of the countryside before I leave since 95% of my time is being spent in Mumbai on this visit. I don't mind that by the way since I am enjoying getting to know this city pretty well and seeing a lot more than the tourist neighborhood of Colaba, but it'd be nice to see a little taste of the country life to whet my appetite for a future trip.
A future trip to India by the way will be *just* India. I think part of why I'm tired is cause I broke the rule and went to too many countries in one trip. I'm extra glad I bailed on Burma on this trip cause I never would've had any energy left for this. So next time, only India and definitely learn Hindi before I go. I have been going to China repeatedly and I just forgot what it is like to not be able to communicate. It really does make a huge difference to me. Some people don't mind pointing and gesturing as necessary and not being able to talk freely to locals, but it means a lot to me. They do speak English here to some degree, but at least several times a day there are people I want to speak to more than I can. I am going to remember that lesson before I go traveling again.
As usual, much more to come...
I think the honking is a big factor. Rarely do let's say 3-5 seconds go by that I do not hear a car honk. Usually it is a chorus of honks. I've tried to listen to them as music instead. When they are off in the distance or when I'm indoors and they are not quite so loud, it's manageable, but often walking in the street that's not the case. Normally they are so loud as to make you want to cover your ears. I'm one of those people who covers their ears when an ambulance or something goes by. I know too many people from music school with ringing in their ears, and having had that for a day or two after loud concerts, I definitely don't want it for the rest of my life. That said, you can't really prepare yourself for it here, such that I would worry that if I stayed here for months or a year or something, it'd only be a matter of time before I'd have hearing damage. I wonder how many people already do.
So the honking makes up some huge bulk of the noise. Of course there is the engine and people noise as well which contributes. There are also the smells. Car or bus exhaust, pollution, stagnant water, garbage, unknown smells of human origin. Those are the bad ones. There are some good ones too, like the incense that a lot of vendors burn to keep flies away from their food. Then occasionally there's the food and spices, but I find it usually gets drowned out by the other smells.
The constant staring doesn't help anything. You'd think after China I'd be used to it, but I guess not being able to shock them out of it by speaking the local language doesn't help. Also, people do tout things quite a lot, most commonly little tourist souvenirs, toy drums, bootleg dvds, or knockoff merchandise, even more so in this neighborhood or near anything remotely touristy, though since I walk without a backpack or anything and I have gotten better at ignoring them completely, they often don't bother approaching me anymore, so that's been better the last few days.
Maybe most of all, here in India like in China, personal space doesn't really exist the same way. So people are constantly passing right near you, standing practically on top of you, bumping into you, touching you, spitting right next to you, shoving and pushing into each other to get in and out of places, passing directly in front of you if you're waiting for something or standing on line, and whatever other kind of offense you can imagine. At the restaurant waiters or customers are always putting their hands on the table or the chair as they pass by to support themselves. They also tend to stack things up on unused parts of the table like extra menus or whatever. Since you're often (at the budget places anyway) sitting at a table with people you don't know, this is hardly a surprise.
Did I mention about the guy sitting in front of me on the train? We were sitting knee to knee on a train, shoved between people. This guy first goes digging into his nose past the second knuckle, no shame at all. Flips the findings onto the floor in what is supposed to be a subtle gesture I think, then pulls out a handkerchief/rag. A lot of Indian men carry these around to wipe sweat off of their faces during the day. This guy is a business man by the way in a nice enough business shirt, tucked in, gold watch, etc. So it's probably 100 degrees on the train, and this guy goes and sticks his rag into his armpits one by one, taking a good 5-10 seconds to soak everything up, then takes the rag out, folds it once, and wipes off his face. I'll let that sink in. The guy next to him had a pack of some kind of tube-like chips. He bites the plastic to open it, then spits out the plastic and it lands on the guy in front of him. Neither react. When he's done, he throws the plastic out the window. There are very few garbage cans around the city in general. They most often are found near a food stall of some kind, but most of the time people just throw their trash on the ground. I guess this is similar to a lot of countries I've visited in Asia, and of course we have assholes who do this in the States too.
Anyway, that's a smattering of things which occurred to me. As far as my activities go...
Sunday I took a local train by myself up to Kandivali East where Shweta lives, then walked a few minutes to the local bus station and took a local bus out to her area, about 15 minutes away from there. I think not speaking the language is part of what makes everything feel so different to me than China. I've just become used to being able to communicate comfortable. Of course there are differences, but at least part of what makes it feel so exotic is not being able to communicate effectively and thus feeling myself to be even more of an outsider. Shweta's suburb was much quieter once I got away from the train/bus station area. You can walk through the streets without encountering much traffic, although there are people walking around of course. There was a giant field where lots of young folks were playing cricket. We went up to her place and her Mom cooked me a delicious home-cooked Indian lunch. We sat and talked for a long time both before and after. For those who don't know, Shweta and her Mom and I met through Couchsurfing. They came to New York almost 5 years ago exactly and stayed with me just before my own long trip to China. Now 5 years later I'm sitting with them on the floor eating lunch in suburban Mumbai. Incidentally, I've eaten certain Indian foods with my hands, but pretty much always bread or dosa which I then used to scoop up whatever. This was the first time I ate rice with my hands. It's one thing to fold up some bread and scoop, but I felt like each time I made an attempt with the rice and dal (lentils) mixture, I ended up getting more and more on my face. I was proud of the attempt regardless. For the curious, the meal was roasted papad which she cooked directly on the gas burner of the stovetop, a delicious cabbage dish that I wish I could get in NYC, roti, rice, dal, and then a bunch of other items at least one of which was a spinach dish of some kind and the others I am not sure. All around delicious to be sure.
Shweta and her friend Shrestha then took me for a walk around the area to a nearby temple where I could stare at fish or be stared at like a fish, whichever I preferred. I chose both. Next came an auto-rickshaw ride to the mall, which provided an opportunity to see something insanely out of place. The mall was basically a western-style mall with lots of upscale shops, all clean and new, the only real difference being more vegetarian food in the food court. Subway had some kind of potato patty sandwich which looked kinda good, though I don't think I'd be brave enough to just have raw lettuce & tomato on a sandwich here no matter where it came from. Also the separate security booth for women to be wanded over with a metal detector is something you don't see in the states. In fact, I think most malls still don't make every customer pass through metal detectors. We reserve that mostly for our public schools. We walked around the mall, really only stopping so I could try to play the drumming game in the arcade which turned out to be all Japanese music anyway. Shweta and Shrestha played a game of air hockey. Oh yes, I also played whack a mole, the basketball game where the hoop is too small, and some other game where I hit things. I had to use up the credit I was forced to buy to play the Japanese drumming game in the first place. After the mall, we wandered next door to an upscale supermarket. This was kind of like a Walmart I think. Downstairs was all food, kind of like a big Walmart or any supermarket I suppose. They had a huge selection of produce and interesting products, both imported and domestic. It reminded me a lot of Whole Foods actually. Upstairs was kind of like K-Mart. They had bikes, appliances, computers, dishware, and basically everything else you can imagine.
After this, I headed back on the local train to South Mumbai where I am staying. That train trip is something like an hour but it goes fast since there is so much to look at on the way. I have since taken the train a few times, though that day was really my first. You can hang out of the train like in the movies. I haven't ridden it during rush hour, though I did arrive back in the south around the time the rush hour was beginning such that there were large throngs of people waiting at the Churchgate station trying to hop onto the train before it stopped moving such to secure themselves seats before the train stopped and everybody had a chance to get on. This is apparently common practice and to get on and off effectively, you pretty much have to do it before the train stops moving. I was proud of my dismount in which I didn't knock anybody over or fall over myself. Apparently when things get really busy people are known to ride on top of the trains, but I haven't seen this yet though I would love too. The ones I have ridden on are electric, so I'm not sure riding on top near the cables is a great idea, but I'd still like to see. The trains here are apparently safer than they were. When you arrive at an outlying station, there are now walls preventing people (sort of) from walking in every direction across the tracks to get where they want to go. I did see a lot of people going through fences and doing this anyway, but apparently not too many years ago, this was all just open and it was quite common for people to get hit by trains when crossing the tracks. Several friends from Mumbai have told me they have seen people hit and seen bodies laying next to the tracks after being hit. I know people jump in front of the NYC subway on purpose once in a while, or have a seizure like that one guy, but seeing bodies lined up next to train tracks is pretty freakin' intense. So at least some newer safety measures have since been introduced making it necessary to duck under a broken fence to get hit by a train instead.
So that's only the end of my second day in Mumbai. I have often said "never a dull moment" but in Mumbai there seriously is *never* a dull moment. Even laying on the bed in my hotel room I can hear tons of yelling and noise and honking coming from the street just outside. As I type this, I'm in a friend's office which is blissfully quiet. It's on a side street and the office is in an interior part of the building away from the street noise. It's actually an amazing difference.
So a few other highlights as long as I have access to this computer for a bit...
I went to a CS meetup on one night and met about 15 or so local Couchsurfers. Mostly men as I have heard the Mumbai CS group can be a little prone to guys trying to pick up girls which is too bad. There was one girl from Poland who came with her travel-buddy from Scotland. He had been in the European equivalent of the Peace Corps and lived in rural Rwanda for 2.5 years. That was quite a story. He spoke the local language quite well apparently and I think that must be one of the most awesome things to bust out on the presumably rare occasions you run into people from Rwanda. I asked him if he had, and on the trip even he had found a few African folks who happened to be from Rwanda and when he approached them and spoke their native language, well you can imagine it must have been mind-blowing for them. I mean, how many non-Rwandans in the world even know that language? Very cool. Another Indian guy lived in Madagascar and then Tanzania for two years each. He had gone initially to work on a documentary I think to promote tourism in Madagascar which had been finished relatively quickly, but then he stayed and "just had a ball of a time" for the rest of his stay. There were a few other non-Indians. One guy was from France who came over and said something like, "I heard you have spent some time in China" or something like that so we got to talking about it and turns out he lived in Wuhan for two years so I immediately responded in Chinese, "So you can speak Chinese then?" And I think we were both equally surprised and happy to find someone else with whom to practice. He is now living in Mumbai working I think on automobile design of some kind and has been here for about three months.
So that discussion of China spread to the guy next to me who is Indian who is studying Mandarin and has just began. He works with an organization in India run by a Chinese girl and an Indian girl who had previously lived in China. I ended up meeting up with that guy last night and with his friend who are both in the Chinese class, and helped them since I'm a bit farther along in my own study. They put me on the phone with the Indian girl who co-runs the school and on Sunday I'm going to drop by and sit in on the class then join them for dinner next week. I love doing stuff like that and everybody I have talked about here has been really nice. The original student who I met at the CS meetup is named Mulchand and he invited me to dinner after our Chinese chat. We went to a great place which I never would've guessed exist as it was very run-down looking from the outside and inside as well actually, but after emerging on the 7th floor or so which was actually the roof, we came out into a beautiful covered rooftop filled with cabana-type structures, comfortable chairs and couches, nice lighting, sand on the floors, and in general the sort of place I might expect to find in Miami or something. From there we enjoyed a beautiful view of the southern Mumbai coastline and one of the more delicious meals I have had on this trip which consisted of the best vegetable biryani I have ever had and something called a papadam roll which defies description but is basically some sort of mashed and spiced vegetables inside a rolled and slightly soft papad. Also for dessert we ordered something called Jelabi. I may be spelling that wrong. I ordinarily can't enjoy Indian desserts as they contain dairy, but this was just a sweet sugary sort of candy consistency which I will have to work hard to hunt down in the US upon my return.
Mulchand also invited me to join his photography group on a trip to a nearby "hill station" which is a small town in the countryside called Matheran. That trip starts tomorrow by catching a 5:45am train several hours southwest of the city. I really want to go and it is my plan not to miss it, though my stomach has been gurgling a little but I will try not to let that stop me. The train is only a few hours so it's not that big of a deal and I really want to see some of the countryside before I leave since 95% of my time is being spent in Mumbai on this visit. I don't mind that by the way since I am enjoying getting to know this city pretty well and seeing a lot more than the tourist neighborhood of Colaba, but it'd be nice to see a little taste of the country life to whet my appetite for a future trip.
A future trip to India by the way will be *just* India. I think part of why I'm tired is cause I broke the rule and went to too many countries in one trip. I'm extra glad I bailed on Burma on this trip cause I never would've had any energy left for this. So next time, only India and definitely learn Hindi before I go. I have been going to China repeatedly and I just forgot what it is like to not be able to communicate. It really does make a huge difference to me. Some people don't mind pointing and gesturing as necessary and not being able to talk freely to locals, but it means a lot to me. They do speak English here to some degree, but at least several times a day there are people I want to speak to more than I can. I am going to remember that lesson before I go traveling again.
As usual, much more to come...
posted by Dan at 2:09 AM
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