Bindu's Repose

Friends in Mumbai

I met two really nice women from Canada at the hotel my second day in Mumbai. They are both studying Occupational Therapy and are here on their way to a placement in the boonies in southern India. We spent the day together today figuring out how to deal with our respective train journeys at VT station (I think we won a world record for how many times you can be bounced between two queues).

After sorting our tickets, we went in search of a big market called Mortha (sp?). As we got near this little guy attached himself to us and wouldn't take no for an answer. "I work in the market" he kept saying. We kept asking him to leave us alone and he would go off sulking and then as soon as we would turn our backs, there he would be! Yikes, eventually we asked someone for help. Our "savior" said two or three words to the little guy and "poof", he vanished... amazing, I want to know what was said!!! That was a cool trick.

We walked through an amazing fruit market. Too bad we can't eat raw stuff, it smelled so good. We found an alley that had tons of sari stalls. And then a building that was filled with people selling dresses.

Tamiza wanted to get a couple more outfits for the placement so we went through the whole bartering processing with 3 or 4 different vendors. They appear to ascribe to the following marketing strategy: Overwhealm the heck out of people and they will make bad/hasty decisions. Amazing.... Dress after dress after dress being thrown down (esp ones that didn't meet the requirements...) At the 3rd or 4th stall this sweedish guy shows up looks at a couple dresses and proceeds with the most amazing bargaining process. I really thought a fight was going to break out at the end... It was good for us, because we got nearly as good of a deal without having to fight very hard :)

The three of us went out for a very hot Indian meal at my current favorite Indian restaurant ever :) Apoorva in the Fort area of Mumbai.

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I left for Pune the following day (10th Jan)

Posted by binduwavell at January 9, 2003 10:25 AM