Honk if you love MUMBAI!

After a long flight to Mumbai we were still very excited and slightly numbed by not having had much sleep. We, thankfully, had a car arranged to take us to our hotel and managed to skip the potential chaos of having to find transportation.

We spent 2 days in Mumbai walking the streets and taking in the sites around us... easing ourselves into the culture slowly. We hung around at The Gateway to India but couldn't stay long before the vendors selling things became too much for us. A few of us enjoyed our first curries at Cafe Leopalds on Coloba Causeway, where we also browsed the many stalls set up with trinkets and very enticing jewelry. We found it very hard to hold back our excitement when we found a store of gorgeous vividly coloured Sari's. The store was decorated with very extravagant silver furniture that we were tempted to send home. :p It was hard to pull ourselves away from this refreshing gem in the rough... At night we enjoyed some live music at the swanky Bluefrog bar and later some lounge music at AIR, an open roof bar on the top of the 4 Seasons Hotel... these were by far the nicest bars I think we will see in quite a while!

The thing that struck us the hardest were the many terrifying experiences in a taxi on the streets of Mumbai. There were no actual lanes or kind of control and everyone felt the need to honk at each other to let them know that they were behind them, overtaking them, mad at them, just any reason to honk really. It's a shock that we didn't see any accidents. Blood pressure rose as we sat in our taxis with other cars, motorbikes, bicycles, animals and pedestrians coming at us from all directions. We came within inches of crashing into something many many times. But we made it out unscathed....

...And on that note we are off to rent some bikes in Goa! Pray for us!!!

(pics will be uploaded very soon... well as soon as it takes to find decent internet connection anyway!)