Mumbai: Food Poisoning, Shameless Stealing and a Flying Boat
The train journey from Surat to Mumbai took just a few hours, but it was very hot and I didn’t buy enough water because I thought that the water will be sold on the train. But the sellers only sold “Garam chai”, which is hot tea. To my surprise they didn’t sell water throughout the entire trip!
When I arrived to Mumbai central train station I had no idea where I would be staying the first night. I knew there was a place for me the night after, but tonight I had no arrangements made.
I was a bit tired of sleeping in the waiting rooms and being stung by mosquitoes so I decided to get a nice hotel for a change. I went to the shopping centre were I was able to get free wifi and searched for good hotels on my laptop.
I found one nice hotel in an area I didn’t know anything about, but I trusted my intuition. To my relief the area was excellent, it was south Mumbai, near the Gateway of India which is one of the most expensive and beautiful places of Mumbai. Unfortunately that hotel was full so my search for a place continued.
What a change from Surat, these two places are incomparable, they are like black and white. In Mumbai I got almost no looks at me, there were plenty of European people (mainly girls my age and older) and the Indian people were used to seeing many tourists.
There were plenty of beautiful buildings around, a lot of restaurants, yellow and black cabs and white horses with decorated carriages. I saw plenty of police officers and even tourism police for helping tourists.
The shops were selling quality items such as bangles, hair accessories, Arabic and Indian clothes and books. I ended up spending more money during my first day in Mumbai than throughout my entire India trip.
I still didn’t have any place to stay so I thought I will search around plus visit some hotels I found when I was using wifi in the shopping centre. There was another hotel I found online which looked beautiful and affordable. (The prices of Mumbai property are one of the highest ones in the world, just to let you know.)
The driver of my autoricksaw finally found the hotel but it was also full. So for the next half hour I was aimlessly wandering in search of another hotel. Finally I found one just a minute away from the India Gateway and although it was very expensive I decided to take it.
I got a big air conditioned room with a big beautiful bed and the TV I knew I wouldn’t watch. Once I had the shower and relaxed a bit I went out to further explore the area. I loved south Mumbai, there weren’t too many people and the energy of that place was amazing.
In the evening I met up with my first host’s best friend who lived in Mumbai. He was a very interesting person with an amazing story. He came to Mumbai without any money and had to even sleep on the streets to reach his career goal. Now he achieved what he wanted and is enjoying his life.
It was getting late so we went for a short walk and then we went to the bar on the rooftop where we had two lassis (it’s an Indian yogurt-like drink). He surprisingly could read palms which is not the usual interest people have. He offered me to read my palm and I agreed. He was very accurate in many statements and he got me interested in palm reading too.
That night I slept extremely well as it was the first night in a super comfortable bed in a long time. In the morning I left for the place of stay a bit further down south so that I would get to know other areas of Mumbai.
As the days passed in Mumbai I ended up visiting many parts of the city and my opinion about this city slightly changed. Too many people, too many cars and too much pollution made this city not as attractive to my eyes as it looked on the first day. I took a bus for only one stop and it took half an hour for the bus to get there. I actually couldn’t wait for it to reach the stop and jumped off the bus a few hundred metres away before the stop as it was moving extremely slowly.
The pollution is quite bad in Mumbai, even worse than in Delhi but not as worse as in Surat. Mumbai is a must visit place indeed but I really couldn’t live there. In Delhi you get traffic but not That much traffic and plus you can use metro in Delhi whereas Mumbai doesn’t have this convenience. So Delhi for me is a much better place but that’s still arguable of course since I have been in Delhi only for a short while.
After some days in Mumbai I decided to stay at home the whole day because I was tired of too many people and cars. I just looked through the window, worked on my laptop, sipped lemon and ginger tea and that was kind of it. I was enjoying the peace of being alone and didn’t want to do anything much.
In the evening of that day however I was invited to go to the Juhu beach which is one of the best beaches in Mumbai. It was an okay beach but it was full of rubbish and people didn’t usually swim there because it was too dirty. After the beach me and the local friend who invited me to the beach went to the cafe and right next to us sat several Bollywood stars.
When I got to a place of my stay me and my friend ordered non spicy Chinese rice and although I knew that it was not a good idea to eat non spicy rice in India I still decided to take a risk and ate a little bit of it.
That night I couldn’t sleep at all, my body felt really strange, I would get hot, then cold and then I got a full blown food poisoning with all its symptoms. My body was very weak and I only managed to fall asleep in the early morning hours. After I woke up I couldn’t get up from bed for a long time, not even for the water or to answer calls. But I didn’t panic and I just let my body get as much rest as it needed.
After many hours of further sleep I managed to get up and drink some water. I kept sipping water as I knew that that’s what you should do when you have food poisoning. Then I googled other cures of food poisoning (thanks Google, you probably saved many lives!) and found out that I needed to eat fruits like apples and bananas. I also talked to my mother who advised to drink tea.
After many hours of sleep finally I felt that I had enough energy to take a shower. After the shower I took some rest because my body got tired just from taking shower. I slept a bit more and then felt that I could go out to buy some fruit.
After eating apples and bananas and drinking tea I felt much better and my body made a full recovery in around 24 hours. That was also the day that I planned to stay in Bandra which is another place in Mumbai. So thankfully my food poisoning was completely over by the time I had to leave.
Bandra
Once in Bandra I decided to buy a street samosa (Indian fried snack). Ok I know I just got food poisoning, but it wasn’t because of the street food or Indian food in general. Street food never made me sick and I felt fully recovered so I decided to buy it.
So I went to the stall and bought a samosa and when the seller gave me the change and the samosa he accidentally let go of the 10 rupee note and it was almost carried away by the wind. I managed to step on it but couldn’t pick it up because in one hand I was holding change and a wallet and in another a samosa.
Two men bent down to pick up the note from underneath my shoe and the homeless looking guy took it first. He kissed the ten rupee note and was slowly putting it inside his pocket, right in front of the actual money owner! It was sooo funny! So the owner ran up to that old homeless guy and took the note away from him and the homeless guy thought it was very rude to take the money from him like that:)
When I got to the place of my stay and settled, I decided to walk a bit to explore this area. Bandra is a very nice place and it used to be a fishing village. There are still families of fishermen living on the coast. It has a nice park (maybe more than one, I don’t know) and a beautiful port. It also has many expensive houses were Bollywood stars live.
In general Bandra has a very different feel to it than south Mumbai. Not better, not worse, just different. Maybe a bit more informal and relaxed. The food here was quite tasty and because I lived right near the coast the weather was super humid and my body had to adjust again. I couldn’t sleep for a long time because of this super high humidity.
In Bandra I made some friends from different walks of life. I love meeting very different people because it helps me understand people more and it makes me more compassionate.
There was one guy I was introduced to who smoked cigarettes with weed every few minutes. When once we went to a cafe and talked about life he would make some super strange statements, like that his goal in life is to buy a flying boat where he would live and when he would get bored with one country he would fly to the next. And he was dead serious about it. Plus he said that he would open a restaurant in that boat and he would make every day something different for his customers to eat.
He was working as a filmmaker/photographer in the movie industry. He took pictures of many Bollywood stars so it was interesting to hear some shocking facts about very famous Indian stars such as Ashwarya Sarai or Shilpa Shetty.
He would sleep daytime and then work and party night-time. He had many friends who would smoke weed with him. He was very upset when he found out that I don’t drink, don’t smoke tobacco and certainly not weed (or nothing else for that matter). When he found this out he thought we had nothing in common, and he was right.
In the following days I met a nice American girl who was marrying an Indian guy so she was in Mumbai to meet his parents. We decided to keep in touch and let each other know if we find something interesting to do or see in Mumbai.
I also met my Delhi host’s best friend again and he taught me some palm reading. Ｉwas very grateful to him for that. Then he said that two of his work colleagues wanted to meet me and I said sure why not. So he invited them and we all met up near the port of Bandra.
The two people whom we met were a couple and they couldn’t get married because the girl’s parents objected their marriage due to different castes. It’s such a shame that some Indian families still make a big deal about this whole caste thing.
The next day I was invited to the meeting of only girls (locals and tourists) in North Mumbai. It was Monday that day and I was in south Mumbai because I wanted to book tickets to the Elephanta island. However I soon found out that on Monday there were no boats going to this destination.
So I thought I would purchase the ticket to the meditation centre place (that’s my next destination) from there plus get the tickets to the North Mumbai for the meetup. I went to the train station and whilst standing in the queue one girl approached me and asked where I was buying the ticket to. When I told her the location she was very surprised because she was going to the same meditation centre. This girl was from Australia and I will call her Justine throughout this post.
It turned out we were going to stay in the same meditation centre during the same dates! She told me that she just came to Mumbai and she was alone so I invited her to join me for the meetup I was going to. She agreed and we both purchased the tickets to North Mumbai.
Once we got to North Mumbai we took an auto to a place and the driver had a hard time finding the place but eventually he did. There were 4 other girls in the apartment so it was six of us in total. We went to the beach known only to locals and spent a great time there.
Before heading home we decided to purchase grilled spicy corn on the beach. I love the corn made this way or boiled – you should try it too if you find yourself in India!
The husband of one of the ladies in our group (who was from Mumbai) joined us shortly and when we were leaving he asked if anyone wanted to go on his bike. I straight away said yes and in the next few minutes we were on a bike heading back to the apartment.
Once there, me, Justine and a French girl who was also in the group decided to go to south Mumbai for karaoke. But once we got there Justine was really tired because it was her first day in India and instead of going to karaoke we decided to take a walk.
Also Justine was going to be an extra in a Bollywood commercial the next morning. I was offered an extra role as well (on the first day I came to south Mumbai) but refused when I found out that they pay only 500 rupees for the entire day of hard work in the sun. Somehow that really didn’t sound attractive:)
Whilst walking down the streets of south Mumbai I found out that the French girl also wanted to go to Elephanta island (the island I wanted to visit but couldn’t get the ticket as it was Monday) so we decided to go there the following day.
It was a fun night out with only girls and we had a lot of interesting conversations and funny stories. Another local girl the French girl knew joined us as well and she was talking about her experience in the meditation centre (she was in the same centre I will be going to). She told how one day she woke up in the meditation centre and lost sense of where she was. She said that when she woke up she kept repeating aloud:
“Where am I? Where am I?”
And the guys we passed by on the street told her:
“You’re in Mumbai”.
It was getting late and I started thinking how to get back home. It was a long way back as we were in south Mumbai and I was staying in Bandra at that time, which I guess is somewhere near the middle-west of Mumbai. Thankfully the French girl offered to host me.
She was staying in south Mumbai with a wealthy Indian family and when I saw their house I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a huge house right near the beach, overlooking one of the most beautiful spots in Mumbai. They had many rooms and there were around 16 people living there – 8 of the family members and 8 servants.
The servants prepared some Indian food for us and they were standing watching me, Justine and the French girl eat and when we would run out of rotis (Indian bread) they would put them on our plate – one by one – which was really funny for us as we weren’t used to such way of eating.
I slept at that family’s house and then on my last day in Mumbai me and the French girl woke up early and prepared to go to the Elephanta island. The ferry was just 15 minutes from where we were staying so we got there quickly.
The ferry to the island was around 45 minutes long and we spent all this time talking with each other and other people on the ferry, like with the Indian interpreter who could speak fluent Spanish, English, Hindi and 5 local Indian languages.
Once on the Elephanta island we went over a long bridge-like structure and finally reached the main entrance to the island. Before entering the official start of the island we bought some corn and wanted to go to the island with the corn but the Indian interpreter guy that was on the boat saw us attempting to do that and warned us that monkeys might take our food away. So we ate the corn before entering the main island.
It was very hot that day and when we entered the island we had to climb numerous stone steps were sellers were selling interesting jewelery, elephant statues, clothes and food. I decided to buy an Indian snack because I have never seen this type of snack in India before and whilst I was eating I saw the monkeys on the trees closely watching my every move. I got a bit scared since I didn’t want to be attacked by them and the man who sold me the food saw the monkeys too and scared them away.
My friend was really scared of those monkeys so she stayed away from me whilst I was eating.
Then we saw the ancient ruins of the temples which were interesting but not as exciting as I was lead to believe by some locals. It was an okay island full of monkeys.
Before heading back we saw a family of monkeys and decided to take a closer look at their life. Even my friend came quite close to them and we looked at how they communicate with each other.
The male monkey saw us watching his family, got up and came very close to my friend, stood up and started making a really creepy sound. My friend froze out of fear and I ran away. The locals laughed seeing the scene and then once my friend managed to move away from the monkeys she laughed about it too, though she will probably never closely look at any monkey ever again.
When we got back to Mumbai we went to a cafe in a shopping centre and we were sitting there for ages because that place was properly air conditioned (outside was really hot at that time). Once it got cooler we went back to my place in Bandra and spend some time walking around that area.
For some reason my Indian sim card stopped working. That was the worst time for this to happen since the next day I was going to the meditation centre where I wouldn’t be allowed to go outside and buy another sim plus in my experience only in Mumbai a foreigner can get a sim card (I’m still not sure about it though). So that was very bad news and we decided to somehow get another sim for me. Plus Justine was coming from a Bolywood commercial and she didn’t know exactly where I was staying in Bandra, so I really needed a working sim card.
We went to several shops where finally the shop staff told that all i needed to get a good network sim is my passport. When all the documents were completed for my sim and I purchased it my old sim card started working! So now I have two sim cards under my name.
Soon after this event I got a call from some Hindi speaking man which I managed to work out was the driver of Justine. He didn’t speak any English but after a long conversation I somehow explained how to get to where I stayed. After an hour Justine was in my place and we both went out to take my French friend to the auto for her to get a train to her home.
Justine and I stayed out for an hour or so and I showed her the local area. We decided to go to sleep early because the following day we were catching the train to the meditation centre.
I will soon update you about my experience of ten 10-hour meditation days in the meditation centre.
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My name is Simona Rich and I help people improve themselves through the articles and products of this website. Although I have found my life's purpose and now I spend my time traveling throughout India and sharing my knowledge, my life used to be completely different.
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