Welcome to Mumbai! The picture above is the gate of my hostel out to the street--big, leafy palms and other trees, crumbling slate (?) sidewalks and the occasional car. It's a sleepy pathway, two blocks removed from a bustling market street:
I soon learned that the only word of Hindi that I know, the greeting "namaste," is pretty much obsolete in the big city, especially among the more cosmopolitan crowd. When I asked some of the girls in my dorm (called a hostel) how to say "thank you" in the semi-official Indian language, they all looked at each other for a moment before telling me that I'd seem pretty antiquated if I tried to use it. My best bet is to go with plain old "thank you."
It's taken me a while to share my first posting--I've been here for a whole week now, but some things are slow going around here, like internet hookups. Just like in the US, the IT guys have their own odd corner (their nook is shared at the college with a separate glassed-in room where the server sits in brightly-lit wired isolation like an electric-chair victim), their own secrets, and apparently, their own timetable. There's a fluidity of time best described, I think by the following actual conversation:
Me: "So you said that your servicemen were going to be here at 4:00 pm yesterday and we waited for them for three hours."
IT: "Yes. They will be there today. What time will you be home?"
"What time should we be home?"
"Well, 4:00. They'll be there 4:00, 4:30."
"No problem. We'll be here at 4:00 to let you in."
"Yes, they'll be there 4:30, maybe 5:00."
"Ok. But will they really be there?"
"Yes. 5:00, 5:30 maybe."
This chronological line of bargaining went on for several days. And just like in a modern Indian fairytale, the third time was the charm.
Meanwhile, my roommate's modem blew out temporarily somehow, and we were wondering if they had chug-through tech support stops for Dell customers on autorickshaws.
I have more pictures and many more experiences to post in the next few days, just not more time tonight. "Thank you" for reading. . . did I pronounce it right?
Happiness is a warm tiffin at 7:30 . . . this is my tiffin, a thermos (minus any cartoon affiliations) loaded with hot vegetarian Indian foodstuffs. Every night the tiffin man comes, wearing shorts (rare here) and a combover (more prevalent, but not so common as the mustache) and looking like he just came off of a golf course in Augusta, bearing about 25 plastic thermoses for the girls living in our hostel. He speaks better English than most of the shopkeepers here, and is unfailingly friendly and attentive. He saw that we weren't eating the home-packaged yogurt (partially because people insist on calling it "curd," which sounds inedible to begin with) and started getting us Dahi brand, a respectable yogurt here. He charges about 75 cents a day for a full meal in stackable metal dishes: each night we get white rice, roti (indian wheat tortillas), lentil soup of some fashion--could be yellow, could be brown--and an entree. There's also a little plastic container of cucumbers and limes which I'm not supposed to eat, but I don't know how long I can really hold out. Entrees range from really spicy green beans to barbeque-spiced kidney beans to spicy cauliflower to spicy potatoes. There seems to be a theme. . . but I think it's all great. We all spend a little too much time relating digestive stories here, but I've been incredibly lucky so far (knock on Redwood). Also, I've been eating tiffins for three weeks and haven't paid a dime yet. He bills at the end of the month. My bill will be $19.50 for a whole month of dinners Monday-Saturday. Below is the typical spread:
Since Mumbai's a large city, many workers don't get to go home for lunch, and others who come from the villages make a trip about once a month. Actually, we've found out that the cafeteria workers at the business school live there, sleeping on the cafeteria floors at night. Just like Horn & Hardart's replicated home-cooked meals in the big cities of the early and mid-twentieth century, Mumbai has establishments with signs outside saying "Lunch Home." It is the same language, they just use it differently. We realized quickly that we weren't really welcome in these places when looking around we were the only women inside and while others were served in 5 minutes, our lunch took over 45, but in general I haven't felt unwelcome often, which is more than I can say for a lot of tourists and immigrants in Philadelphia, I'm sure.
