Photo safari in Bombay

Mumbai might not be the prettiest, cleanest, most lovely or the richest city seen with a conventional set of eyes. But after living here for almost a year - I know where to look to see the beauty of this vibrant city. I have learned how to look into the trains and see the ocean of colours that can't do anything but make you smile, stand in the doorway of the same train and watch how the most amazing picturesque scenes float by - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - And where most people (even me in the beginnig) would just see all the garbage, pollution, dirt and poverty, i now look past all that and see a lovely beautiful city filled with warm, open and always friendly Mumbaikars (the people of Mumbai).

I wanted to capture my view. And share my Mumbai with everyone, so i took my Nikon with me and started shooting...


Marking of the 2nd class ladies compartment on the Western Railway in Mumbai.


Passengers in the ladies compartment waiting to get off the train at Andheri.


Elphinstone Road, a South bombay stop on the Western railway.


Slum-area at Mahim Junction seen from the train tracks.


Old women sitting in the 2nd class ladies compartment in an afternoon Churchgate-Borivali train


Mango stand on MG road in Goregaon


Two ladies crossing the street in the MG road - SV road crossing in Goregaon.


Street food. Pani Puri stand outside inorbit mall.


Rickshaw-meter.


Me having a (much needed) cold coffee in Colaba after a long day!

Dalchini (!?)

I had gone to Kandivali to sleep over at Riina's house (Riina is an exchangestudent from Finland - for those who might not now...)




We went to 'more!', a small supermarket to buy the ingredients for the cake we wanted to bake. We got all our ingredients but we couldn't find the cinnamon. We asked the lady in the counter, and she was like yes yes (still sitting there). Once again I asked her "Where is the cinnamon?" and her answer was, again, "yes yes" (!?) - she, like many working class indians, didn't speak english! so Riina and I tried, without succes, to explain, in hindi, what cinnamon was... After a little while a female costumer walks in, and I ask her how to say cinnamon in hindi, she then ask the girl who worked there "Elaichi kahaa hein?". Now i just happen to know, don't ask me why, that Elaichi means cardamom, so I tried to explain to the lady that cinnamon is the one commonly used in desserts, is a kind of dried bark, not the same at cardamom, and finally she looks as if she understand, the lady ask for dalchini. I think, NOOOO (!) dal means lentalsoup!!!... But luckily the lady was right! cinnamon in hindi is Dalchini - yet another word added to my hindi vocabulary. Practical lessons everyday - the world is my college!

Inbound orientation

Soo... Just a short post ... I went to the inbound orientation last sunday, so great to meet everybody! got to use my french a bit :) and made some friends: a couple of us (Severin and Caspar from Germany and Janina from New HApshire, USA) met up yesterday and went for lunch!

Yesterday I changed hostfamily for 8-10 days, now I live with Arun, Jyoti and Prajwal Chaudhari :) and the day before yesterday we made Chicken Biryani, I think thats my favourite indian dish so far!!! Today I went with Jyoti (hostmom) to the medical center where she works as a dentist. A nurse called Nilima showed me around, and I took some photos.

Next sunday Im having a couple of inbounds over for lunch at my host fam's place...

In a couple of hours we'll be going to my hostdad's sisters place, because her son has his birthday... I gotta get ready!


-Maria

So yesterday (wednesday) I was supposed to have dinner with the Chaudari family (my 3rd host family), but the club president asked us all over for a small party. All of my host families and the presidents family was gathered, and had tons of food (I have noticed that I love the food, but I'm not too crazy about the sweets/desserts!)... overate Again, again! The president gave me a lovely rotary-mug. His family had gotten me a traditional indian dress in a nice green color.



Still enjoying... take care
:) Maria

One big binge!

I'll just start off by answering one question which i get all the time: I am extremely grateful that I (yet) have not experienced any 'stomach problems' caused by the indian spices!.. And its certainly not because I don't eat them: just last saturday I forgot to search my food for remaining chilies, and accidentally chewed half a small green chili (that doesn't make it any better, cause when it comes to chilies, the smaller and greener, the spicy'er!) and what did I then do? I drank almost a liter of iced water, and when that didn't help, I (on advice from Dadi) started eating the pastries we had baked the previous day, that finally helped, but I felt a slight but constant burn on my tongue for the next two days! ... What did that teach me? Danish pastry rocks! -even in India !

Well to get back to the main topic, my bingeing, I went to a dinner at my counsellors on sunday. My last host-family and a couple from rotary had also come, and all in all we were 14 people (one were an infant, but what the hell)... I think they must have been cooking for 20 hours or something like that, first we had massive amounts of starters, some deep fried vegetables wit green chutney, shallow fried fish, raw vegetables with dip, idli and I think that was about it... The main course consisted of a giant pot of vegetarian pasta, one kind of indian curry, two kinds of thai-curry (one veg and one non-veg), rice and homemade garlic-breads... For dessert we had this indian thing (i don't remember the name, but it was a deep fried dough dipped in sirup) had they put a but of raspberry jam inside, and rolled them in sugar instead, could i easily have been convinced that they were a small edition of what we in Denmark call "Berlinere"

bureaucracy and a pair of shorts.

So now I'm back in English.
Today we were very busy, left the house around 7.45 to avoid the worst traffic jams(not with much luck if you ask me!)... It was raining heavily all morning(and when I say heavily, I mean HEAVILY!!!). First we went to the danish consulate, no problems there.
The bureaucracy didn't start until we reached the police station. Hoping for the best, expecting the worst; we went into the station, The receptionist sent us to the 3rd floor where we had to wait for half an hour just to be informed of all the documents that were missing (apparently my passport, Visa, copies of both, guarantee form, school admissions, letter from Rotary, host families electric- and telephone bills, passport sized photo with red background and a perfectly filled out police form weren't enough!). But this receptionist wrote down my name, verifying that I had been there, and gave us till monday to get everything right, and then we could finally move on to the fun part of the day! :)

After this, Neha, Christian, Janhavi, uncle and I were all craving for some lunch, so we went for lunch in a small south indian restaurant (actually more like a cafeteria)... Great food!!! But you see: One car, 4 teenagers, one host father and a driver. How can that work? well, it can't really! But the smallest person (happens to be me) is to sit on top of the others. But when the smallest person (weight-wise) happens to be one of the biggest persons (height-wise) a problem occurs... This person (still me) has to bend her head more than what good is (consider that I under normal circumstances are just about 0,5 centimeters from touching the sealing with my head)... We drove to a mall wherein Christian were dragged around in all the girlie shops advising Neha and Janhavi about what would be fashionable in Denmark... I bought a nice pair of shorts (not that short though)...

Finally we went up to the food court and split two slices of pizza, 4 hot wings, a portion of fries and two sodas (all for Rs. 410 = 51,25 kr.)... And I owed christian Rs 100 from a bet we had last week, so he got himself a two scoop chocolate icecone :) and then he was happy!