A sighting of Indian's Simon Cowell

As the last of the monsoon rain comes pouring down on the streets of Mumbai, and as I realize how many pages of my history book I still have to read, I figured it would be the perfect time to update my blog.

The wonderful thing about India is that you never know what you’re going to be doing in an hour, a day or even in the next few minutes. Sometimes this unstructured life is not a good thing. But for the purpose of this journal entry, let’s say that it’s a wonderful thing for the moment.

At my internship today, the woman who volunteers to teach some of the older children at the nursery offered to take me to a Durga Puja festival. I knew that there was a lot of dancing with sticks involved, but that was about it. On TV, I’ve seen some of the dancing that goes on, and it is beautiful to watch. Everyone dresses up in these elaborate costumes and dresses that are made for this Hindu holiday. And with any Hindu holiday, there is bound to be idols that are meant to be worshipped. But you can only read so many guidebooks and so many newspaper articles about it, before you just want to see it for yourself. So that’s what I did.

So after my internship, the woman (who I’m blanking on her name right now) and I went to one of the Durga Puja festivals that was near the orphanage. And of course the one day that I don’t bring my camera with me, I need it. I took some pictures with my cell phone, but long story short, I can’t get pictures from my cell to the computer right now. But anyway, the Durga Puja holiday/festival….When I walked into the temple/shrine that they had set up for the holiday, my eyes went right to the beautifully painted clay idols. One thing that I will never get tired of in India is the beautiful colors that are always around. These idols, and there were about 5 of them, were painted gold, pink, orange…just gorgeous! And they were so intricate in their details. The goddess Durga, the main idol, had ten arms coming from her body, and each arm was holding a weapon of sorts.

After taking some pictures of all the idols, we made our way through the crowd and to the food. The Durga Puja holiday came from the Eastern side of India, particularly the Bengali/Calcutta side. So of course the food that they had there was food from Calcutta. We ended up just getting some chicken fried rice, but it was still pretty good. The sweets though were wicked yummy. Both of the sweets that I tried were made out of milk and sugar, and had a sponge cake kind of consistency. Just as we were finishing our sweets, this guy came up and asked me if I liked the festival. Me thinking it was a random Indian attempting to talk to an American, just brushed him off and said that it was great. Then the woman told me that he was a nationally known singer who had produced songs for a lot of Bollywood movies….what?!?! Here I was, looking stupid as ever, that I ran into a celebrity but just brushed him off.

Singer Abhijeet

Ooo and did I mention that he’s a judge on Indian Idol (the Indian version of American Idol)? Later, the woman that I went with told me that he is the one that organized this entire festival here. As he saw us eating our sweets, he asked us why we’re eating over here when there’s a huge buffet of food from Calcutta (that was free by the way). So he brought us to the buffet, pulled us past the line of a whole bunch of people and made sure we were given what we wanted. They gave us some rice, broccoli mush/stew, fried & battered leaves or eggplant (I couldn’t tell) and another type of sweet from Calcutta. I tried my very best to eat it all, but I was stuffed even from eating the chicken fried rice from earlier!

After that whole experience, I headed back to my apartment. Which is the perfect time for me to mention that on the way from the train station to my apartment, the rickshaw that I took was blasting Hindi music & American pop music....weird! I've never been in a rickshaw before that had music blasting like that. All I could do at that moment was think about the tv show, Cash Cab, and how cool it would be to have a Cash Rickshaw show here :) Anywho, so hen I got back, I put up my feet, had some tea and of course, took a little nap. When I woke up, the woman that I'm staying with, Blanche, and her friend had come back from their house shopping around Bandra. Blanche's friend is looking for houses/apartments in Mumbai, but yet it's so difficult to find a good place that's not a couple million dollars. After waking up, I wandered into the living room and had a nice conversation with them that opened my eyes to the housing market in Mumbai. From this, I learned that Mumbai is the 4th most expensive city in the entire world to live in (after NYC, London and Tokyo) and that you can't get any decent size apartment for less than 4 crores (1 crore=$250,000 US Dollars, so 4 crores is $1 milllllion dollars). It's crazy!

After talking for a little bit more, Blanche thought it was a good idea for all three of us to go to the exhibition that's in town (an arts & crafts fair with different vendors from all over India). Even though I'd already been, it sounded like a good idea to finish off the afternoon. So we made the trek to the exhibition grounds via rickshaw and started browsing all the different vendors. In the end, I managed to get out of there only having spent 800 rupees ($20 US dollars). I got some Indian jewelry, some fabric to make into a kurta (long Indian shirt) and some really cool black pants that had this gold embroidery and jewels on it.

And that ladies and gentlemen concludes my day :)