Eid Break in India: Mumbai

After Ramadan, the school takes a nice week-long break from school for Eid Al-Fitr. For those celebrating Ramadan and Eid, it's usually a time to gather together with famly. For a majority of the expat population, who consequently don't celebrate such holiday, we use the time to get the heck out of town and travel. As I alluded in my previous post, I went to India. Over a series of posts, I'm going to attempt to wrap up my experience by describing each of the cities we went to. I'll include some pics, but for 500 of the 716 pictures that I took you can follow the link to my picasa web albums.

On Friday morning, we all - being Greg (my coworker and office-mate), Emily (one of the TA's for CS), Megan, and Hillary (both PGH students studying here for the semester) - got up at the butt-crack of dawn to make it for our 7:30am flight to Mumbai. We took Gulf Air, a budget airline based out of Bahrain, so the flight was no Qatar Airways business class. We arrived in Mumbai in the afternoon only to be met by my dear friend Warun Bubna with whom we spent the next several days. Friday night we got dinner at a great little "snack shop" and hung out at the beach on Marine drive before we were too exhausted from the trip. Saturday morning we took a trip to the Gate of India over at the bay area and then hopped on a boat out to Elephanta Island where there are huge cave structures riddled with Hindu carvings and statues and places of worship. That was also consequently our first experience with monkeys, which we later found out wasn't all that special. Upon returning to the mainland, we ate a great Indian buffet mid-afternoon meal and promptly went shopping for Sarees and Kurtas. That night we ate at a restaurant on Marine Drive (the major bay-side boulevard in Mumbai) in the middle of a corridor or shops that lost power half-way through the night and we ended up sweating our way through dinner. On Sunday, Bubs decided to have us head out to Matheran, a little hill station touristy place a few hours train ride outside of the city. We decided to trek the long walk up to the top of the 800m+ mountain, taking in beautiful vistas and sweeping landscape only to realize 1.5 hours into the hike that we were only half way. Needless to say we took a van the rest of the way up and then walked the 3 more km past the drop off point to the actual town. It was so late by the time we got to lunch that we ended up only having enough time to do just that and then grab a taxi back down to the little village and the train station. Getting back to Mumbai we had just enough time to cleanup and eat a traditional Indian-style dinner with his family before catching the 7:40pm night-train for our next destination.

It's hard to characterize Mumbai. It's bustling, it's crowded, it's dirty, metropolitan, invigorating, lively, diverse, and a host of other things associated with large cities. It's got its own charm for those brave enough to really seek it out. Street vendors line the sidewalks to the point where you can barely squeeze by oncoming pedestrian traffic in the cloister-like shopping streets, all the while desperately trying not to make contact with the vendors in hopes that maybe this time they won't try to get you to buy something that's ridiculously overpriced just because you don't look like you belong. Poverty is rampant. It's not the kind of poverty that you can try to ignore in New York or DC b/c they're curled up in an alleyway or the front porch of a church, making excuses in your mind that you shouldn't give them money because it will only go to feed someone's addiction, if not their own. No... it's the kind of poverty that taps you incessantly on the leg while you're waiting outside to get seated at a restaurant, pocket full of coins that are almost worthless to you but would make the difference between eating and not eating that day for the little girl standing there who hasn't brushed her hair or bathed in what looks like months. It's the kind of poverty that rolls up in a broken-down, hand-powered bike to a busy intersection only to get off and crawl over on all fours to your window, tapping to get your attention and get just a small bit of change because there's no way a man in his social ranking with his kind of physical disability could ever get a paying job. You simply can't get away from it. It becomes so overwhelming at times that it paralyzes you. You want to give some change to help them out, but what's the point of giving them 2 rupees today when it only puts off their hunger until tomorrow. Money helps them eat, sometimes, but it certainly doesn't help solve the problem. I know I wasn't the only one in the group significantly affected by the poverty we saw. Unfortunately, urban poverty was only one of the many faces of poverty we would experience throughout the trip.