The new city on a different island
quite a contrast to the poor people on the streets. This is not a normal tourist route, so they are not sitting there knowing tourists are coming. It is really sad.
Even tho it is a holiday, this is the pedestrian traffic
This is an ordinary street
This man looks like he came out of the Arabian Nights.
Almost everyone we waved at smiled and waved back. We even had kids running alongside the bus to keep waving longer
This is one of the street markets, with items on the ground and lots of shoppers ( a slow day)
middle class apartments
Us being silly with the roses we were given when we disembarked from the ship
British style building
Notice the chicken in the man's bag. It was dead but still had it's feathers
Holy Cows
Kids playing cricket in the street
March 23
Happy Easter. We are in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. In 1997 they changed the name back to what it was originally before the British changed it. This city is made up of many islands. We only saw a small part of it on our tour. We spent Easter Sunday visiting Jewish Synagogues. The last few days are holidays in many religions worshipped here. There was a Hindu holiday, a Buddhist holiday, another religion and of course, Christian. The synagogues are about the only things open to tourists today. We rode around the older part of town.
As you can see, the new part is full of skyscrapers and very modern. The city near the port has the old British buildings. They are used for Indian governments uses now, but they still look British.
Since it is a holiday today, the traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian, was a lot less than normal. As you can see, that is amazing to imagine, since there was a lot of both kinds of traffic today. We had to be helped across the streets.
An interesting thing is that, in America, poor people don't live alongside richer people. Here, there are very poor people, living in shacks on the side of the streets, living across the street from upper middle class looking apartments. We didn't see any poor people living near the rich apartment houses, tho.
The markets we saw had vendors selling their items off the ground, not the sidewalks, but the streets. These items included food and spices. Even clothes where lying on a tarp on the ground for sale.
We saw cows. Cows were just standing there, or walking in lanes of traffic, not with a person, just walking along. I guess when you are a holy cow, you can do whatever you want. There was a lady and her child and monkey in the tourist shopping area. (yes, of course that was opened). She was there for us to give her dollars to feed her family.
Mumbai is made up of opposites. The very rich, the very poor, the cleaner vs the dirty. I must admit that it was not as dirty as I expected, and there were beautifully dressed people all around. We did not get to see the "towers of silence", where the Farcies (sp) put the bodies of their dead up on towers. To the Farcies, the earth, fire, wind and water are sacred. So you cannot bury, burn or put to sea your dead. They solved their problem of how to dispose of dead bodies by putting them on a tower above a well. The vultures would clean the bones, which would then fall into the well. When the well is full, they cement if over and start a new one. And as I said, fortunately, we did not get to see it.
I didn't feel like we saw much truly Indian things, since Mumbai is a big city. The dress of the people is the only thing that looked Indian. Most people were happy to wave back at us (as we have experienced in most places we have been)
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