Daily Life


Can you imagine spending the whole morning going to and from the supermarket (actually the only full scale one in Mumbai) just to do trolley load of shopping? The absolute surrender this exercise takes is still just beyond my reach hence blogging in the car.

After all it was only just over two months ago that I could walk to Lidl, Aldi and my local Bio Markt, all within ten minutes max, do a load of shopping and walk home all before the kettle boiled.

Here there is some totally beyond me thing where every item is scanned then the price is checked by the operator on the screen, on the package and on the screen again...before being shipped off to the packer boy who is still half asleep. No recycled bags here these boys use heavy duty plastic, the kind that could be used as a rain coat through monsoon. Nothing like the Lidl girl shoving my groceries along and expecting me to have them Packed ready to pay so she can process the next person.

Daily life can also mean a walk outside my gate to the local Costa Coffee for a shot of what was the worst coffee I ever tasted just two months ago and now is completely palatable, back home via the green coconut seller for a 20 rupee fresh coconut milk, sliced open on the spot. How those boys do not have nine fingers is beyond me!

I did not think I could even step outside my gate and now just a week after living in the apartment here on the tenth floor of Rose Queen I wander past stray dogs, metal wallas, oxen carts and fruit and vege sellers, past the shoe repair guy, the key grinder (who does a terrible job of recreating a key by hand but is s nice enough fellow) and into one of several small stores selling daily supplies - all of which I never needed before living here!

I was just thinking this morning about how we now have a catholic maid to clean for us five and a half days a week (luxury you say - Mumbai has a way of making everything dirty in a day!), a Hindi boy to walk Lizzie three times a day and a Moslem Driver to get us in and around this crazy traffic. All people, all with families and bigger lives than I could ever imagine and now all a part of our life. Forget privacy!

More on daily life another time. It is almost too much to tell in one day!

Popular posts from this blog

An Ascent of Sunanda Devi (Nanda Devi East)

Image
Climbing past the gendarmes between Camp 1 on Longstaff Col and Camp 2.  I am climbing in the middle distance ANZAC Day always bring back all kinds of memories, some good and some less so. Just recently I had some old slides scanned which arrived just before ANZAC day. It was ANZAC day 22 years ago today that I received a call to get on an immediate flight to India to join a Defence cooperation exercise in India which was to involve an ascent of Nanda Devi. The mountain stands at 7816 metres is it protected by a ring of peaks of which 12 are over 6,400 metres. The first ascent was by Bill Tillman and Noel Odell who were able to enter the Nanda Devi Sanctuary via Rishi Gangi Gorge. The ridge between Nanda Devi and Sunanda Devi The peak has a colorful history which includes the attempted installation of a nuclear powered monitoring device for Chinese nuclear tests. Turned back by bad weather, the device was lost somewhere on Sunanda Devi and was nev
Read more

Three Days in Lisbon are Not Enough!

Image
Lisbon definitely falls into the shabby but chic category. There is a real sense of dynamism here which seems to be a combination of entrepreneurial spirit, to start up costs and supportive government policies It should not have come as surprise to us that three days wasn’t enough time in Lisbon.  Both Lisbon and Porto have been Monocle’s poster children for urban gentrification and progressive local government.  This was combined the features of a one of Europe’s oldest but now faded trading empires: a beautiful port with a hilly shoreline; elaborate and still solid buildings constructed with the wealth of derived from international trade routes to South America, Africa and India; and finally a mix of ethnic groups that came to call Lisbon home. Lisbon is built on seven hills above a pretty harbour and this was a great opportunity for Kate and I to train for Corsica.  The narrow streets were home to lots of
Read more

Risk Reward and Skiing in Kashmir

Image
Risk and reward can be seen as two sides of the same coin.  Normally, when you go to a downhill skiing resort, the coins that you flip are small, small risk small reward.  One of the reasons that I love Gulmarg is that you play the game with bigger coins. Paul and Sam, my brother in-law and nephew, had heard great reports about Gulmarg from Jack, Sam's brother, despite Jack coughing up blood for most of his stay.  They decided that a visit to India was in order and, as Sam is a keen skier,  Gulmarg was the priority destination. The adventure started when we boarded the aircraft in Mumbai when I was informed by a Kashmiri on the same flight that Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri native who had been convicted of supporting a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, had been executed earlier that morning.  Needless to say things were going to be interesting in Srinagar as this had occurred after a number of fatal military clashes on the Line of Control. On arrival at the airport at
Read more