Mumbai- Day 3 & 4:
Baby cow on the street!!
We started day three early to tour a famous slum called Dharavi, this slum is different from others because the people who live there have thriving businesses making pottery or recycling plastics and the only different thing about them is that they live in a place that is not very clean, but there are no street beggars because they accept their destiny and think that maybe in their next life they will reach a better state. That's how most people here think, mostly because of their beliefs of reincarnation and karma. It was very interesting to see this place and walk through their city within the city.
We came back in mid afternoon to the hotel and had class and after that there was a cricket game of the Mumbai Indians against some other Indian team and a lot of the group watched it in the hotel's bar along with fans, while we were trying to understand the rules of the game. It was very interesting to see and funny to understand because it's similar to baseball (which I don't even fully understand) so all the comparisons were made between the two and I couldn't exactly follow..
Sunday started very early since we were taking a boat to an island called Elephanta Caves (they don't have elephants, though, contrary to what I believed..), which has a cave that was built to praise Shiva and it is now a ruin because the Portuguese used the temple to practice their shooting. We had to walk up a lot of steps to go see the cave, but it was so worth it! Along the steps were a lot of vendors that live on this island and live off of the tourism that the caves attract.
That day we were moving from our hotel in Colaba, close to the water to a hotel close to Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to be able to have more academic sessions on this campus. We got to the campus, and it's huge!! It is one of the hardest schools to get into in India, next to all of the other IITs because it is only based on one entrance exam that people study for since grade 6! This university is a leader in world technology and advancement and we met some grad and PhD students that work on trying to predict the Indian monsoons, one of the hardest climate predictions, using very advanced computers and statistical models. We then took a tour of the nanotechnology lab, which Biden took a tour of a few years back, and that was very interesting. Driving from the campus to our new hotel, the scenery changed to look a lot more like downtown of a city in the United States with a shopping mall and even KFC inside, which was a change from our last hotel which was in a residential area of Mumbai/ Colaba and had an open street market around the corner. But this is a beautiful area, so I can't wait to see what we explore around here!
We started day three early to tour a famous slum called Dharavi, this slum is different from others because the people who live there have thriving businesses making pottery or recycling plastics and the only different thing about them is that they live in a place that is not very clean, but there are no street beggars because they accept their destiny and think that maybe in their next life they will reach a better state. That's how most people here think, mostly because of their beliefs of reincarnation and karma. It was very interesting to see this place and walk through their city within the city.
We came back in mid afternoon to the hotel and had class and after that there was a cricket game of the Mumbai Indians against some other Indian team and a lot of the group watched it in the hotel's bar along with fans, while we were trying to understand the rules of the game. It was very interesting to see and funny to understand because it's similar to baseball (which I don't even fully understand) so all the comparisons were made between the two and I couldn't exactly follow..
Sunday started very early since we were taking a boat to an island called Elephanta Caves (they don't have elephants, though, contrary to what I believed..), which has a cave that was built to praise Shiva and it is now a ruin because the Portuguese used the temple to practice their shooting. We had to walk up a lot of steps to go see the cave, but it was so worth it! Along the steps were a lot of vendors that live on this island and live off of the tourism that the caves attract.
That day we were moving from our hotel in Colaba, close to the water to a hotel close to Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to be able to have more academic sessions on this campus. We got to the campus, and it's huge!! It is one of the hardest schools to get into in India, next to all of the other IITs because it is only based on one entrance exam that people study for since grade 6! This university is a leader in world technology and advancement and we met some grad and PhD students that work on trying to predict the Indian monsoons, one of the hardest climate predictions, using very advanced computers and statistical models. We then took a tour of the nanotechnology lab, which Biden took a tour of a few years back, and that was very interesting. Driving from the campus to our new hotel, the scenery changed to look a lot more like downtown of a city in the United States with a shopping mall and even KFC inside, which was a change from our last hotel which was in a residential area of Mumbai/ Colaba and had an open street market around the corner. But this is a beautiful area, so I can't wait to see what we explore around here!
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