Day 2: Mumbai

This night we picked up Remy at the airport. As it was very early we got there in just fifteen minutes, during the day this trip can take more than an hour due to the traffic. Remy brought cheese, schippersbitter and a very nice Turkish Airways blanket with him.
Today Thijs had to go working again and Remy and me went to see Bombay. We started with a walk through the neighbourhood where we found many holy cows and a few goats. In the sea a few men were performing a kind of religious ritual, which was odd because the sewers also end up in there. Next we took a walk through some medium slums. When we got back to the city we found that many people were living on the sidewalks. This is troublesome as this leaves no sidewalk to walk on.


Next we took the train and visited Mumbai’s main tourists attractions: Marine Road, the Gateway to India and the Victoria Station. At Victoria station I used to scales to check my weight for a fair price of 1 rupee. The card I got from the machine said: 72 Indian kilos. Nice! It also told me : “You love freedom, experiment and investigating”. You learn so many things about yourself in this very spiritual country.

When we tried to get home by train we encountered a real Indian rush hour. When we tried to reach the door about 5 mins before we reached our destination. We could only get within two metres of it and there were still about 30 people between us and the door. When the train stopped people rushed out, people rushed in and it was impossible to get out. The people here call travelling on the train “a free body massage”.
We got out on the next station. When we tried walking home we got lost in one of the worst slums in Mumbai. Although the people live about 1,5 meters from the railway tracks they seemed very cheerful. After a while we decide to take out the map. While we were looking at it a policeman on a motorbike showed up. The man seemed worried. After a while we had a chat with him and he wanted to help us. He could not tell us where we were, but he did seemed worried that we were in that neighbourhood and would not leave until we took a taxi home. As we did not know where we were we decided to take the advice and thus got home quickly.