MUMBAI.

i'll give it to you straight: i was scared of india. i've been talking to a lot of people about traveling and people talk about how exhausting india is. it's not a place you go and easily fall in love with, like thailand. india's full of rough people and it's hard to get around and the men constantly leer and you'll definitely get ripped off.

so why am i going here again? *sigh* but we'd bought the place tickets, gotten the visas, so we were going.

and now that i'm here...i think everyone was exaggerating. this city's been wonderful to us so far. sure, we've met some unscrupulous seller guys and sad, puppy-dog-eyed children have tugged on our arms and begged for money, but overall, this isn't the harsh country i thought it would be.

granted, we've only been in mumbai/bombay/i can't decide what to call it. it's a big international city and people act differently in cities like this; generally, everything should be up to international/western standards. so i'm doing india-lite version.

but really, we've met mostly wonderful people. there was kamul, who we met on the street and who wandered around town with us for a while, helped us get sim cards, and invited us to a party later (which we declined and he understood). our cab driver from the airport was really sweet, pointing out all the sights of the city and making sure we got into our hotel. there've been countless other interactions--you know, those brief moments you have with strangers, whether they're in a hotel/restaurant/park/whatever--that haven't been harsh or rude at all.

this isn't to say that the city is all calm and full of wonderful people, though. it's a bizarre, loud, DIRTY place. oh man, you guys, you should've seen my feet yesterday. we went to the washer place (where thousands of guys are literally just washing clothes in these concrete basins) and walked around, so my feet got wet and gross in there, then we went to chowpatty beach on the arabian sea (aka a trash can), and my feet got grosser there, so that by the time we got home to shower at the end of the day, my sandaled feet looked like they were wearing shoes.

people are selling the weirdest stuff here. peacock feathers seem to be popular with the vendors, as do incredibly oversized balloons. seriously, they're the size of a my-size barbie. yeah, i totally and completely wanna walk around this crowded city with a giant balloon.

ok maybe those things aren't THAT weird. with that intro (and in such a foreign place) you were prob expecting something like elephant heads or snake venom.

there are almost zero white people around here. i thought that since we were coming to such a huge place, we'd be mobbing around with white people all the time. instead, we've been pointing out white folks like they're some sort of novel attraction because we hardly ever see them.

there are, however, a zillion men. i've never seen so many men (and so few women) in my life. today maddy and i walked to this green space in the middle of the city, next to the university and high court, where a ton of people were playing cricket. it was maybe two, three football fields long, filled with hundreds of men playing cricket. we're pretty sure that we were the only women in the whole area, save for this one other white girl with her SO. i've never been so completely surrounded by so much testosterone.

last night we were offered the chance to go to some sort of grand event for presumably a bollywood thing. we would've gone except it was outside the city so we were supposed to go spend the night in this random place. no thank you.

now we're staying at the salvation army's red shield house. I KNOW. i feel so traveler-y. it's dirty and sort of run down, but maddy and i are loving it. we have our own room, our own bathroom, and free breakfast and lunch included in the room price. we eat in a canteen. it's just like school.

this afternoon we're gonna go up to the hanging gardens and jain temple. we're gonna take an old school cab. i swear they haven't updated their fleet since ford invented the car.

oh, and yesterday we took a ride on the train, too. the public transport in the city. when we first walked in to the station it was insane and we were like OH HELL NO THIS IS CRAZY AND SO MANY PEOPLE AND IN AN UNREADABLE LANGUAGE. but then we sat for a while, observed the ways of the people, and got more confident about it. we took a cab anyway (we were exactly sure where we were going), but on the way back hopped on the train. we were in a ladies-only car. it was awesome.

headed back upstairs to read and escape the sweaty afternoon heat. afternoon time is nap time.

p.s. kuala lumpur, malaysia, was pretty uneventful and not really worth mentioning.