We had a wonderful evening last night, in an Arabic/Syrian restaurant on the 20th floor overlooking the Gateway To India. Great party, on a par with the best, but only missing the fireworks.
After a lie-in and a late breakfast, we went out into Mumbai and it’s markets. As you see more of Mumbai and get to relax into it, so it grows on you. But for the telecoms readers, the street furniture has to be seen to be believed. (See pic!) we also had our first traffic accident today, and fortunately we won! The old Fiat taxi lost. But no-one seemed too concerned.
First stop was to the lunch box men. It’s such an unbelievable story that it must be true. Many of the 6.5 million daily commuters are men and they like to have proper, hot meals at lunchtime, prepared at their homes. And so a team of lunch box men pass through the suburbs in the mornings picking up metal food containers from their homes and taking them to the stations on planks on their heads. They slide the planks onto the commuter trains, which are met at the termini by more teams, who sort out the boxes and deliver them to the men at work! The process is then reversed to return the empties for the next day!! This is amazing in itself, until you hear the numbers, which are into the billions, yes billions, each year, with next to no false deliveries. And now more amazing still – the boxes have no names on them!!! You can’t make these things up.
Everything about Mumbai is about scale–an inexpensive place to live except for real estate prices, which are the 3rd highest in the world. It’s just continuous heaving motion, all the time, everywhere. Once you’re used to that, then it’s fascinating.
We went into the food markets first, and the displays, range and quality of everything was astonishing. We felt like the tourists in St Antonin who photograph all the things that we in France take for granted. And whilst there are beggars, and callers etc, and very few Caucasians there, you feel very comfortable. We bought lots of nuts for not a lot. ( to digress, we saw some cashew trees in flower on the backwaters, and they’ll be laden with nuts in a few weeks! ) It reminded me of Leeds Market in my youth!..
After that it was the cloth, material market–simply amazing. An area the size of the whole town of St Antonin given over to just materials. We could have bought some gorgeous rolls! From there onto the silver area, the accessories area, the stainless steel area etc. it was truly fascinating.
To be with someone local, who knows her way around was wonderful. We’re just back and writing this up before something go eat this evening and then packing to leave tomorrow about 11.00 for the flight to Udaipur, where we’ ll be moving north into some much cooler weather, we believe.
We hope that the photos capture the scale and movement of Mumbai.
