Final stretch! and all about food

SHIRA: 

Jordan and I spent our last weekend (ok, Sunday) in Mumbai and now it's down to the nitty gritty business of readying ourselves to travel for a month.  This includes killing all proximate bugs (inside and out).  And calling hotels and seeing if prices in all of India have increased by about 500% as they have in Mumbai.  And last minute shopping.  And, of course, saying goodbye to the friends we've made here.  We're also hoping to squeeze in a showing of Harry Potter 7pt2 in 3D -- but (I Guess) it's not a huge priority.

Yesterday we splurged on a fancy shmancy brunch because, hey, we deserve it.  It was an almost 5 hour affair that was all you can eat delicious delicious food that was ordered off of a menu rather than buffet-ed.  There was live music and games.  I rocked Uno but Jordan had me beat at Jenga.  All in all a good time.  After that, shopping!  We saw our very first mall in India and it was pandemonium!  While Jordan nursed a hot tea I walked around a bit and was disappointed to find that, even in India, the mall looked pretty much like all other malls I've seen everywhere (maybe especially in NYC).  It even included a California Pizza Kitchen!

A couple notes about the food in India:
One of the things that I think we both miss the most is having a kitchen and the ability to cook for ourselves.  We've eaten out every single meal (except three Chabad meals) for two months.   During this time we have made a couple of discoveries:

DO NOT ORDER THE VEG AMERICAN CHOW MEIN.  I really hate to over use capital letters, but seriously.  Don't do it.  We made that mistake exactly once and received a plate of perfectly good noodles covered in an Indian ketchup-like sauce.  Terrible.

Similarly, milkshakes here are no good.  Even from nice places the consistency and thickness maybe approaches chocolate milk.
On the other hand, mango lassis have become a staple.  More common are plain lassis (a yogurt drink that comes either sweetened or salted at your request) but mango ones are the best and are always made with fresh squeezed juice.
And on that note, salted (or salty) drinks are not uncommon whereas bitter ones (like unsweetened tea or coffee) are very difficult to find.

Mumbai has a strange mix of cuisines -- on almost every menu you'll find southern Indian specialties like dosas, thalis (meals that come with rice or bread and several small vegetable dishes), and idlis (fermented rice flour balls).  But they'll also have north Indian food, which is what's mostly served in Indian restaurants in the US.  Nearly all also have Chinese options.  Who knows why.

Most people eat all meals with their fingers and hands, and we're still feeling out food etiquette.  For example, I only recently learned that it's bad form to lick your fingers.  (But what else are you supposed to do when there are no napkins?)

Thankfully being vegetarian is super easy here as restaurants will visibly advertise themselves as being "veg" or "pure veg."  I would say that about half of the restaurants we see are vegetarian. 

In general we've been solidly warned against fresh fruits and vegetables (this will probably be the one time in our life when this is true) and so the majority of what we eat is carb-centric and heavily (and sometimes overly) spiced.  Almost everything is swimming in grease.

Even so, I am (and I think we both are) looking forward to sampling the cuisine of the rest of the country (including taking better advantage of street food).

A short note about service:
We have yet to see a waitress.  We have not had a woman taxi driver.  No women work in our hotel.  In fact, we have yet to see any women working except for the secretary, lawyers, and social activists we work with at HRLN, one woman at the State Human Rights Commission, and a few shop owners. 
In restaurants waiters hover over you until you order, bring your food, and then disappear so that you have to put on a show and dance to get the bill.  When they bring the food, they often dole it out to you on your plate which is strange for us.  We can serve ourselves the food, thankyouverymuch.

JORDAN: I'm just batting clean-up here, so I'll stick to pictures:

This is more common than book-stores here: piles and piles of books on street corners under tarps or wrapped in plastic.

Across from the train station: there are some damn pretty building here; I think this might be the police station. Police stations tend to be among the most beautifully maintained buildings.

These guys under the tarps are a big family that lives around the corner from our hotel. The cars in the shot are because I really loathe to take pictures of people's poverty unless I can do it without them seeing me. Their house happens to be on the sidewalk. Imagine somebody walked into your house and began making a scene over how squalorous your living condition was.

The coast of Mumbai at night.

These cows JUST GOT OFF THE MOTORCYCLE! It was so cool! I wish you had scene them riding down the road, like, Moo Beep Moo! and such

This was the big Buddhist pagoda we went to see. We're on a ferry at this point. The only other things on this island are two theme parks, which you can't even see over the tree line, so I think they must've been pretty shabby theme parks (we did not go, as I was pretty sick).

Well, this is at least a sideways version of the Buddha statue. Subtitle: Buddha - the Super Scientist of Spirituality!

All hail the Super Scientist of Spirituality!

Some pagoda prettiness.

Apparently there was actual little bits of Buddha tucked up in the top of the spire. Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside the pagoda, but there was tons of pictures depicting the Buddha's life in one hall, and the main hall was just a giant stone dome in which people meditated and said "Ohm" alot, while we watched them behind glass so they would not be disrupted by our breathing.

This is one of the theme park mascots that they put on the path to the pagoda, trying to lure you away from an ascetic, spiritual experience in favor of plastic cartoon deer.

This is a purple rhino.

So, we did happen to find the one skating rink in Mumbai, and maybe India, which was advertised with this poster showcasing Indian folks skating on double bladed skates (for balance). So naturally, we felt smugly superior and took pictures.

A few pictures of the strings of shanties that line the way to the theme parks.

Some family lives in each of these little separate units.

I got these by perfecting the art of holding the camera casually in my hand at waist height and keeping my thumb on the shutter button. Notice the satellite dish. Oddly, you'll notice a ton of slums and shanties with satellite dishes hanging off them.