Mumbai, India

India has 24 different official languages. I even saw a great billboard ad for a bank that said “In India, languages change every 400 km. Thankfully your bank doesn’t.” Or something like that. Of the 24, I am somewhat familiar with one of them: English. The other 23 I don’t even know a single word of, so when I hear anything that’s not English I have no way of knowing which language it is. For this reason, for the purposes of my blog I will divide communication into two categories of languages. The first category will be English, and I will place the other 23 official languages of India into a category I will call “Not English.” Having said this, a hell of a lot of Indian Standard English is spoken. Not everybody speaks it fluently, but most people throw in random English words into their Not English conversations. Many people code-switch, and some people seem to use English as their primary language. I do have to complement India on something. It may be a dilapidated hellhole, but its government tries hard to pull itself together the most it can to portray a good image to tourists. Unlike that shithole Egypt whose government, despite benefiting from a massive tourism industry, could not care less what you think of their fucked up country. The power flickers on and off here just like it did in Syria, so I have armed myself with a flashlight. I saw one in a store behind the counter and had a little trouble getting it using the word “flashlight.” Then a light bulb went off in my head that if we drive on the left side of the road, when the power goes out we use a “torch.” One thing that annoys me about India is that coughing, sneezing or clearing your throat as loudly as possible seems to be a tradition. It’s getting on my nerves. So anyways, I managed to get the hell out of Kochi. Lonely Planet India said that there was a train from Kochi to Mumbai taking 41 hours. I arrived at the station and sure enough that exact train with the exact schedule was posted up on the board, so I filled out the reservation request card (what is the point of that other than to just waste paper?) which I then had to present to the agent to buy my ticket for the next day. That’s when I realized that the LP authors just copied the schedule down without actually taking the train. The reservations agent looked at me strangely and said “why do you want this train?” You see, this is not how you get to Mumbai. Instead, it would be much faster to take a fast train that went to some place called Kalyan and take local train to Mumbai. It would only take 24 hours to get to Kalyan and then a local to Mumbai would take one hour, much faster than the 41 hour train. I could not find Kalyan mentioned anywhere in LP (though I did later find it on the map) but Wikipedia said it was a suburb of Mumbai. So the next day I arrived at the train station and got on the train heading for Kalyan, having no idea exactly where I was going. I had bought a ticket (for pennies, I might add) for the nicest class aboard the train. It was old and shitty, but what do you expect? Overall not that bad and a somewhat pleasant experience. The car was divided into units of four sleeper berths separated by curtains. It was air conditioned and pillows and blankets were provided. There were two toilets at the end of the car, the door to one of which proudly proclaimed that it was “Western style.” Sure enough, there was a Western style toilet in there that opened straight onto the tracks. I know this is a dumb question, but do toilets on Western trains still work that way? One of the other passengers was a grumpy old Indian man who introduced himself to me. “My name is Thomas.” This is not just a tech support phenomenon. The Western name for dealing with Westerners is deeply engrained in Indian society. An attendant served delicious meals (extra cost) and overall it was a nice ride, but it did have some of the hallmarks of a third world transportation experience: screaming children and people who like to talk very loudly on their cell phones so you know they are wealthy enough to afford cell phones. Getting into Kalyan is where the fun began. I honestly tried to find where to buy a ticket for the local train to Mumbai, but I couldn’t. And I had seen some of the local trains and they weren’t something I was eager to get on. So I found a taxi driver who would take me the LOOOOOOOOONG ways into Mumbai. BUT taxis here aren’t cars, they’re auto rickshaws. Google Image that shit for a true picture of horror. Yes, riding in that thing at full speed through the slums of the third world is as scary as it sounds. They are completely open and there are no seatbelts, so a crash would probably mean instant death. The entire time I had to maintain a firm grip on my suitcase so it wouldn’t fly out. This was also not a point to point adventure. First we had to get gas. At the gas station I saw the funniest trash can I’ve ever seen: a giant penguin with his mouth wide open and a sign on the mouth that said “Use Me.” Then on the highway in the middle of nowhere we broke down. The driver got out and started collecting bits of rubber from the side of the road. That’s the great thing about the third world: there are always spare auto parts lying everywhere. Or at least auto fragments or something that could be used as an auto part. After maybe about 20 minutes he got the engine going again. Then we reached a point where either he was about to break down or for whatever reason I couldn’t imagine he would go no further, so he gave me some of my money back and got another cab for me to take me into Mumbai proper. This actually was an air conditioned sedan vehicle. I tried to tell the driver I wanted to go to a hotel in Colaba, but he just kept babbling to me in Not English. Eventually he also reached a point where he would go no further and passed me onto the final driver, who would take me where I wanted to go. This guy spoke good English. As we passed a small beach crowded with fishermen he pointed out to me: “when the Pakistan people attack Mumbai this is where they came,” referring to the attacks on Mumbai just a few months ago by terrorists who arrived from Pakistan by sea. So…do you think is a good thing to be telling tourists? My hotel has one of those mini-water heaters common in this part of the world. The instructions advise that the temperature of the water can be controlled by adjusting the “hot water cock.”