14.10.10

mumbai's tendencies

today's our last day in the city, day number six. our flight leaves at 6:40 am tomorrow morning, meaning we'll be hopping in a taxi at 3:30 am.

buh bye, restful night's sleep. eh, i can't really muster up the anger, though; when we finish this leg of flying, we'll be in cairo among literally too much history for my brain to hold. OH BUT FIRST we have a layover in kuwait. lol.

anyway, i've noticed some things around here in the last six-ish days.

the indian head bobble
it's not a nod...it's not a shake...it's a side-to-side tipping of the head. they do it all the time.
"hey, can we get this taxi to colaba? on the meter?" response: head bobble..."okay." we get in the back of the taxi and he starts the meter
"four hundred rupees! that's way too expensive. can you do 200?" response: head bobble..."okay." and i buy said thing for 200 rupees.
"we're from america." response: head bobble..."good country."
i can't figure out what the head bobble means. i thought at first that it meant no, but it seems like maybe it means a moment of uncertainty followed by a yes. 

"what's your good name?"
people are always asking for our names and where we're from. i've had a couple indians sidle up next to me just to ask where i'm from, then walk away once they know. whenever people ask for our names, they always repeat them and go, "nicki. good name." or they'll ask for our "good name" right off the bat.
and by the way, when we respond we're from america, a handful of people have gone, "obama! good, good. bush, no good!"

beauty
indian women have taken street clothes to the next level. they have sarees of every color and they never look foolish in these neon bright colors or mismatched patterns; they can rock it like it's nobody's business. they have jewelery hanging off every limb, including the most ornate (and what must be painful) nose piercings ever. they're making me want to buy a saree and get my nose re-pierced. (i might give in to both of these things, but the latter will have to wait until america.)

i'm famous in india
you'd think we were, anyway. we've been in pictures with at least 50 indian people; this is not hyperbolic in any way. when we sat at the hanging gardens for an hour or so the other day, families would come up to us and just rotate through, snapping picture after picture. when we were at elephanta island, as soon as one group stopped us to take a picture with them, it was free rein for every other group to step in and take pictures with us, too. yesterday at haji ali, as we were sitting and quietly reading our books on some rocks off to the side, minding our own business, a family tapped our shoulders and asked us to be in their family portrait. you'd think we were a mumbai attraction.


i wasn't ready to leave don det, laos, and i wasn't ready to leave hanoi, but i think i'm ready to leave mumbai. i'm done being a spectacle here, i'm done with the pollution of the city, and i think i've seen enough for now. i've loved it and i think it's a wonderful city filled with characters (mostly charming and friendly, but you can't win'em all, eh?), but i'm ready to move on.

egypt, here i come.

10.10.10

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.