The big city of Mumbai

Since we have arrived in India, other travellers have warned us about big cities in India, telling us how busy, crowded and dirty they can be. They must have not been speaking about Mumbai, because we were really pleasantly surprised about it! They call it the Indian New York, even though that might be a tad ambitious, Mumbai is a great city in its own right. The highlight for me was definitely all the delicious food Mumbai has to offer! From the street food to some cheap small restaurants, Mumbai’s dining seen would have been reason alone to stay a couple days in the city! However we did try and visit a couple of things too. The first day we spent walking around south Mumbai which has many really nice buildings dating back from Mumbai’s colonial era. South Mumbai also has a really nice shore which makes for the perfect viewpoint at sunset. I don’t know what it is with India and sunsets but they are incredible, I now understand better why its traditional for indians to start their day with a salutation to the sun! In Mumbai we also visited the Dhobi Ghat which is the biggest man-powered wash machine and basically is a big area with clothes being washed and dried, it look very impressive from the outside! We also went to visit the biggest slums in Mumbai which holds over one million people. The slums were far from what we had imagined, this I am sure dosent apply to many slums but Darahvi in Mumbai seems to be quite a striving slum as it is made of two sections: one section which is made of hundreds of small businesses and the other section is residential. The business side is made of many impressive businesses that produce over 700 million dollars worth of products per year. This is really impressive, especially when you see how many businesses are just built on recycling, for example a soap business which goes and collects all the leftover soaps from hotels to then melt it and repackage it! Work conditions in the slums however seem hard and get paid very little. However many people choose to stay there because of its strong sense of community and as they have plots of land owned by their family for generations. The whole thing was beyond impressive and hard to put into words.

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Another thing we really enjoyed about Mumbai were its local trains which serve as public transport. At first we had just hopped on like others around, to realise we had actually jumped into the male compartment. One of the guys kindly told us to follow him at the next stop and showed us the girls one. How much nicer it was, far less crowded! But the reason we really liked them was because they are doorless, so you can just hold on to a pole and swing your upper body out of the moving train, super fun! So all in all Mumbai was a great first city to experience in India!