We left Pune at around midnight a few days ago thinking that the we could sleep on the bus and arrive sometime early in the morning and avoid paying for a room. It took two hours instead of the four that we were told so we came into mumbai in the dead of night. That early in the morning Mumbai was a deserted desolate wasteland. For a city of about fourteen million people I was very suprised to find that, aside from our taxi, there was almost no one up and about. More than half of the people that live in Mubai reside in the slums or simply have no home at all. The only company that we had on our drive from the bus station to our hostel were people sleeping on the ground.
Despite my initial feeling about the city the next morning I woke to a very busy vibrant city with lots to do. We got up and hit the town. I had forgotten to bring a copy of my passport, which you need to stay in any of the hostels here, and so had to deal with the annoying business of trying to get a copy faxed from the office here in Mumbai which took a few hours. Afterward we walked around a bit and saw the Gate of India which was pretty cool then headed to a very famous Haji Ali Dargah Mosque which was quite interesting. It was built in the 19th century for the Muslim saint Ali Dargah and is located on an island in the bay that is connected to a bridge. I haven't ever really had any exposure to Muslim culture and it was a very good experience.
Like most things since I've been here it was a very hectic and chaotic trip. Despite the chaos however travel here is amazingly cheap and we were able to see a lot of the city simply by taking a taxi where ever we wanted to go which you could never do in the states. It has been a fun weekend trip but it will be good to get back to Sadhana. Tommorrow I will be teaching again at the informal weekend school and I am excited for that. I also had a chance to pick up some really good books about India while I was in Mumbai which I hope will help give me a better framework for the things I am seeing and experiencing.
Well thats all for now, I miss you all and hope all is well.
3 comments:
how cool that you are doing this!
seriously this is such a great opportunity, wow.
im jealous!
have fun out there, and um ya we will miss you at the reunion. maybe we will write you a letter or something :)
Sounds like more fun experiences. I hope that you have a camera and are capturing all of this action, even if you can't post the info right now. When do you come back home?
Interesting, are you ever going to be able to post pictures? We subscribe to National Geographic, and they've done many features on India. One that fascinated me was about all the waste that old technology leaves behind. They showed HUGE dumping grounds in India full of only old montiors, towers, speakers, cell phones, clocks...stuff like that. Anyway, there were little children who would work all day picking the stuff a part for copper and other valuable things they could sell. Very interesting, anyway, that's a tangent. Thanks for sharing.
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