Extreme Lederhosening » Landed in Mumbai

With about 20 million people, Mumbai is India’s largest city. Most people live in the northern districts and outside the city center…
We decided to stay in a part called ‘Santa Cruz’ with really few tourists. You can walk around for hours, go to the busy Andheri train station without seeing any western people. Looking for train-timetables is obsolete – you won’t find any…
A four kilometer drive with a motor-rikshaw or so called “Tuk Tuk” in the crazy city-traffic will take you about an hour. We were definetely impressed how Mumbai’s drivers manage to manouver their cars safely through this heavy traffic. If Indian would execute a European traffic system, we assume a total collapse of the traffic system: Five rikshaws at two traffic lines – this would be impossible with stricly executed European traffic regulations…

On Monday night we arrived in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. The taxi driver found the way to our accommodation through countless streets (they are not unnamed, but there are just no signs with the names 🙂
We adopted the Indian style of living, realized that it takes more than half a day to go to the city center and back, and planned the days accordingly.

But it doesn’t matter because we met so many interesting personalities. Some are from the city, some are backpackers from abroad, some are just random guys we bumped into: Our Indian friend Vijay manages our accommodation. He is just great, caring for everything we need. Having profound talks about the Indian way of living and other things with him was inspiring. He is one of the nicest guys we met so far, although there were so many friendly faces approaching us.
Another extraordinary aquaintance was Nathan from Canada, who was performing a song for his Indian girlfriend Jana at the seaview-promenade – how romantic! It’s great that he chose us to be his general rehearsel audience as well as to be the last compagnions saying goodbye to before leaving Mumbai. After we returned from our trip to Elephant-Island to a port just anywhere in the industrial area, a Swiss guy not only shared the cab back to the city center, but also his knowledge about Indian habits and experiences he made here.