Top five most surprising things about my time in Mumbai

Well everyone, I've taken my blogging talents elsewhere. A friend of a friend started a travel blog, and I've submitted my first piece to him. In the interest of keeping you all up to date as well, I figure I'd share this post here. As you can tell, I had to provide some additional context for this new blog's audience, so forgive me for repeating anything you already know. Anyway, enjoy!

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My style of travel is simple: I make sure that I know how I am getting from A to B (or A to B to C to J as the case may be), and also confirm that I have a place to sleep each night that I'm there. Aside from that basic structure and perhaps a few general ideas about sites that I'd like to see (Taj Mahal: check), I don't plan out my trips in a lot of detail. In the end I find I prefer the results I get from spontaneity more than I would from a set agenda. 

I have just returned home to the US after working in Mumbai for three months. I traveled over there for work - in combination with a vague desire to further explore a part of the world that I had only briefly visited once before.  Taking my usual approach to an extreme in this case, I did surprisingly little research for my time in Mumbai. Shockingly little, actually. Entering into the experience with mostly stereotypes and suppositions guiding my expectations, I suppose it was only natural that I was in for some surprises. Some realizations were more helpful than others, but in any case, I'm happy to be able to pass on this knowledge to future travelers. If you don't find it useful for yourself, at the very least you may get a chuckle out of how naive I was just a few months ago. With that in mind, I present you with my top five list of my most surprising realizations regarding Mumbai:

5. The weather never cools down. In my experience, tropical climates are really hot during the day (obviously), but they give you some respite at night. The sunsets deprive the environment of a major source of heat, so temperatures cool down. Makes sense, right? Well in Mumbai this never happens. Night is just as hot and humid as the daytime. It's just darker so that people are less likely to see the sweat stains on your clothing. I'm honestly not sure why Mumbai doesn't cool down (except when it's raining) - maybe the 20 million residents emit so much body heat that it keeps the city sweltering day and night? Maybe? All of the meteorologists out there can feel free to correct me on this one. 

4. Vegetarian food is delicious! I chose to go veg during my time in India - the choice was more of a personal challenge than driven by any ideology. I was curious to see whether I could be satisfied without any meat in my diet and figured that India was the right place to experiment with this lifestyle, given the plethora of veg options available there. I went into the experience with low expectations, thinking that veg food consisted of nutritious dishes that taste like cardboard or like something more appropriate for a rabbit's meal than a human's. Oh, how wrong I was. Yes many dishes have plenty of nutrients, but the flavors are varied and intense. You have a ton of options for getting protein, but my favorite quickly became paneer (which admittedly tastes so good because it isn't all that healthy). Stick paneer in anything and I'll probably eat it happily. Also, who knew that okra was so good? My exposure to okra up until now had been limited to the southern US states' deep fried version, with my reaction usually being something along the lines of "meh..."  Bendhi fry dishes in Mumbai showed me that vegetables, like people, deserve a second chance every now and then. 

3. It's not at all impressive to Indian people that I speak two languages. Maybe their ears would perk up if one of my languages were Hindi (because how often do you hear a white blonde girl from Michigan speak Hindi, after all?), but most Indian people didn't care one lick about the fact that I also speak German. Why would they? They all speak English with astounding proficiency - plus Hindi and usually at least one other regional language...not to mention my one friend is who is learning Mandarin in his spare time "for fun." This is a country filled with poly-lingual people, and it takes more than just proficiency in a single foreign language to turn their heads. Two foreign languages? That's about average. Three? Eh, maybe that will earn me a subdued fist bump from the average Indian. Double that, and maybe then they would actually be impressed. 

2. You don't have to know where you're going to get to your destination. Taxis and drivers in Mumbai rarely know where exactly it is that they're going. Instead all you need to know is the name of a nearby landmark, and then once you're in the general vicinity, the driver will yell out the window at passersby until someone gives correct directions. This approach to navigation is so engrained in Mumbai society that most buildings don't have numbered addresses! All you get is a street name, building name, and neighborhood name. To be honest I'm still not sure how mail gets delivered in that city. Magic? 

1. Indian people are not nearly as conservative as they'd like you to think. Let me caveat this one by saying that this is specific to Mumbai - there are parts of the country that are just as conservative as you'd expect. There are parts of Mumbai that are like that as well, but on the whole I was impressed with the cosmopolitan and liberal attitudes adopted by most of my friends and colleagues. My female friends wore short skirts, smoked, drank and swore just like my American friends do (I have awesome friends). People engage in pre-marital sex, do drugs, rouse rabble, and generally do stupid stuff just as frequently in India as they do everywhere else. The difference is more that they are less willing to advertise their mistakes than other cultures may be. Parents still expect their children to be virginal teetotalers who get straight A's and get married by 25 and have their first baby by 25 and 9 months. The idea that a more modern son or daughter can be equally worthy of parental pride and affection hasn't exactly caught on yet, so you're left with a generation of 20somethings who are living in the 21st century but who pretend to live in the 19th century when their parents are around. The question on my mind is: when this generation becomes the parents of 20somethings, will they hold their children to the same standards? Only time will tell...