Day 7: Leaving Mumbai

Hi everyone! Tonight we will be leaving Mumbai for a trip to the North. We are spending the day packing at a leisurely pace. I can drop most of my stuff at some friends of Thijs, which is very pleasant. I still want to arrange for a hotel for when I will be flying to Australia. We have seen a lot of aspects of Mumbai: we have walked through the slums, visited the museum, we have drunk tea in the most expensive places and in the cheapest, we have been in overcrowded trains and enjoyed spectacular views. I am looking forward to seeing more of India and Ahmedabad will be an interesting change as there are only 4 million people living there instead of the 18 million in Mumbai. Nice and quiet probably.

Yesterday we visited, among other things, the Mumbai music festival in the Tata theatre which was pretty impressive. The Tata theatre is the most prestigious venue in town. It was funded with by the Tata family, who are the owners of the largest industrial company in India, they make about everything you can buy in India from tea to trucks. The theatre is usually not so easily accessible for normal people, but for the festival the admission was free. We went there to visit Japanese musicians who were playing a kind of guitar. The music they made ranged from very cool to very annoying but it was a great experience.
The Tata theatre consists of several large music/theatre halls and was built in the seventies using a lot of concrete. In its own way it is a beautiful building and most of all extremely large. In Mumbai there are many very Impressive buildings from this age and if you like concrete you should definitely visit the business district some day. It is too bad that were not allowed to take any photographs inside the Tate theatre. Other architecture in the city is also very nice, but badly maintainted. Before going to the theatre we visited the former Prince of Wales museum, which is build in an Arabic/Victorian style in a similar neighbourhood, also a good recommendation for visitors. Around there districts we also walked through the old colonial neighbourhoods.

The most impressive thing about Mumbai is probably that these thing can exist so closely to the slums. There are very people living next to very rich ones. Now it seems we are leaving. Hope to write soon, bye!