August 28
Hello readers!
This is my first blog post so be nice. If you are expecting grammatically correct sentences, perfect spelling, or witty remarks, you might want to read somewhere else. I don't even know how often I'll be posting so check often.
We arrived in Powai, a "planned community" of Mumbai, India, on August 21st, so I have officially been here a week. So far, it has rained - a lot! To be fair it is monsoon season. Monsoon runs from June through September and the way it looks, August and September get the most rain. Acccording to the Times of India, one of the local papers, between the hours of 5:30 pm Sunday to 5:30 pm Monday, parts of Mumbai received 93.1 mm of rain. For those of you who are metrically challenged, that is 3.665 inches of rain. In a city with no storm sewers you can imagine what happens.
We are staying in a very nice hotel in Powai but it is extremely boring! Joel goes to work every day and I sit in the hotel. In fact, I am SO very bored I have started going to the hotel gym in the mornings. Those of you who know me know how bored I am. We won't drive here so we have a driver, Ali, who takes us whereever we want to go. We're not sure how we feel about that. Ali is a wonderful man and a great driver, and over here that's saying a lot. I am told there are traffic rules but the average American would be hard pressed to figure out what they are by watching the drivers. People honk.....all the time.....not so much to say "hey, get out of my way" as to say "I am here and I am not stopping so you better move your sorry be-hind." Oddly, when there is a major traffic jam no one honks. Go figure. On most roads there are no lanes and when there are lanes, no one pays attention. Remember, there aren't just cars on the road - there are motorized rikshaws, which can and do squeeze in between cars, motorcycles that go whereever they want, busses, both single and triple deckers, and of course the odd cow or elephant. Oh yeah, and pedestrians. Pedestrians have no rights. Drivers will not exactly aim to kill a pedestrian, but they sure don't stop. The only good side to this is that the traffic is usually so slow that if you do get winged you won't be hurt........much.
So far, my world consists of the main drag of Powai. We have been out and about and in fact, I have some wonderful pictures to share but I'll save them for the next blog.
Thanks for reading!
Namaste,
Beth
Hello readers!
This is my first blog post so be nice. If you are expecting grammatically correct sentences, perfect spelling, or witty remarks, you might want to read somewhere else. I don't even know how often I'll be posting so check often.
We arrived in Powai, a "planned community" of Mumbai, India, on August 21st, so I have officially been here a week. So far, it has rained - a lot! To be fair it is monsoon season. Monsoon runs from June through September and the way it looks, August and September get the most rain. Acccording to the Times of India, one of the local papers, between the hours of 5:30 pm Sunday to 5:30 pm Monday, parts of Mumbai received 93.1 mm of rain. For those of you who are metrically challenged, that is 3.665 inches of rain. In a city with no storm sewers you can imagine what happens.
We are staying in a very nice hotel in Powai but it is extremely boring! Joel goes to work every day and I sit in the hotel. In fact, I am SO very bored I have started going to the hotel gym in the mornings. Those of you who know me know how bored I am. We won't drive here so we have a driver, Ali, who takes us whereever we want to go. We're not sure how we feel about that. Ali is a wonderful man and a great driver, and over here that's saying a lot. I am told there are traffic rules but the average American would be hard pressed to figure out what they are by watching the drivers. People honk.....all the time.....not so much to say "hey, get out of my way" as to say "I am here and I am not stopping so you better move your sorry be-hind." Oddly, when there is a major traffic jam no one honks. Go figure. On most roads there are no lanes and when there are lanes, no one pays attention. Remember, there aren't just cars on the road - there are motorized rikshaws, which can and do squeeze in between cars, motorcycles that go whereever they want, busses, both single and triple deckers, and of course the odd cow or elephant. Oh yeah, and pedestrians. Pedestrians have no rights. Drivers will not exactly aim to kill a pedestrian, but they sure don't stop. The only good side to this is that the traffic is usually so slow that if you do get winged you won't be hurt........much.
So far, my world consists of the main drag of Powai. We have been out and about and in fact, I have some wonderful pictures to share but I'll save them for the next blog.
Thanks for reading!
Namaste,
Beth
