Mumbai nights

Our first night in Mumbai was great. We walked around Colaba again in the hope of finding a bit of a party. We stumbled upon a fantastic and zooty bar called Indigo but decided to leave after looking at the over-priced menu. Seriously, the place was priced a la London prices AND was a bit too chic!

Feeling a little hungry we decided that we'd get some food local style. I had read about this place called (not so sure what the name was) in a travel magazine. It had reccomended it for the traditional Thali's. So Julia and I grabbed an auto-rickshaw - like a tuk tuk - and asked to be taken there.

The restaurant was opposite the Mumbai hospital (good sign, non!?). The name of the restaurant was written in Hindi hence me not remembering what it was called.

Julia and I walk and it was just like a bad movie scene. Everyone - staff, patrons, dogs, whatever - stopped between mouthfulls and serving just to look up at what the cat dragged in. These two whities - AND female - AND unaccompanied. Unheard of.
Julia of course is tall, leggy and blonde so she unfortunately had to bear the brunt of most of the staring.

The restaurant was filled with families having their evening meal (another good sign). We sat down at one of the tables. In front of each of us was a stainless steal flat dish with about 5 little bowels placed neatly in a semi-circle. The waiters all come out of the kitchen, each holding a pot with something different and begin to FILL the Thali dish up with the most delicious bits of food.
The flat part of the dish is used for the starch - rice, poppudums, naan - and for the relish - corriander paste, achar, and some other stuff. The little bowels are filled with different stewey type concoctions - chickpea, lentil, veg-soup stuff, raita, curry, potatoe and spinach stuff...and then the most delicous coconut milk-rice pudding stuff.

We were starving from the day's activities and tucked right in! Our dishes were replenished every 5 minutes.
Full to the brim we asked for the bill and were shocked. The meal for the two of us was about 4GBP and we had eaten a lot! It was so good.

We then headed back to Colaba, had another walk around and decided to start heading back to Sea Green Hotel. The first auto-rickshaw to approach us wanted to charge us about 100INR to take us back. This is outrageous considering we'd spent 11INR to get to Colaba in the first place. As we were negotiating, these two young guys on a bike drive by. They offered to help us get home. At first we politely resisted and just started walking down the road from all the bustling.

A couple of blocks down, one of the guys who had been on the bike runs up to us and introduces himself. His name was Sunjay - means Sun in Maharati. His friend joined him shortley and they both offered to walk us home. At first I was a bit reluctant and a bit offish, but they were so pleasant. I instinctively got a good feeling and both of us agreed it would be OK. And it was. In fact they were really interesting. They were telling us a bit about the city, what they do....they taught us the word "Shukria" which politely means "NO!" A word you really need in Mumbai where you are CONSTANTLY harrassed to "come take a look, come buy, please give me, give me, give me". They were both really kind and walked us right to the front door of the hotel.

I will not forget that evening. I think that was the first time I actually felt OK in the city, maybe even the country. Sunjay had said, "I want you to like my country, I am not going to do funny business with you, I just want you to love the country where I come from"