Where am I?

So we wake up in the moring to a loud clanking, have a shot of hot tea and off to school. Well the school is about a mile away. Dressed in a shirt and tie, hoofing it in this heat during monsoon season simply would not feasible. So what are we to do? Flag down a cab of course. For about 20R(40Rs=$1), 3 or 4 people can cram into a cab and ride to school in style. Most of the cabs look like the one I have pictured. They run on natural gas, and they are as narrow as a the width of a quarter. Did I mention they don't have A/C and the cab driver sleeps/marinates in the searing heat? Yeah they mostly smell like doo doo inside. The problem really isn't the narrow cabs, or the lack of A/C. It's the traffic and the air quality! Mumbai has a hugeee air quality problem, caused mainly by the dense traffic. Cars, trucks, bikes and scooters run rampant throughout the city. Traffic is so packed, cabs run within inches of each other. Put it this way, traffic is so dense that if I roll down the windows in the cab I can reach out and touch a bus or clothes line an overzealous biker. Sitting in traffic with the window down can be harmful, as the fumes from the multiple exhausts make you very dizzy and sleepy. After you get to your destination, you usually have to rid yourself of the gnarly boogers that have accumulated in your nose, haha.

People love to honk, more so than the lovely cabbies in NYC. Everytime you cross a street, or walk in the street (the majority of sidewalks are jacked up) you get honked at. Whether it be 3am or 3pm, people honk. They honk if the wind blows. They honk 24/7. So I did some research and asked around. Apparently it's a method of warning oncoming traffic/other drivers of their presence. In fact, it's a way for them to warn each other of impending doom or if a mofo is getting to close to your ride. In fact, the majority of new car owner's first modification is an upgraded horn. Check out what the back of this little delivery van says.

So I'm the only Asian person at The Welingkar Institute of Management that is not
Indian. The guards at the front gate (guards are everywhere, from cell phone stores to the entrances to any public venue) never card me. It's a sweet deal come to think of it. The guards hassle regulars of the school, but because of the way I look they let me roll on by. I think I could get used to this reverse racism. It happens everywhere, not just at the school. I recently went to a five star hotel to get a haircut, and the doors were opened for me, I was greeted, I was tended to hand and foot, no questions asked. Imagine if a dude of the street tried to roll up in there like that. He would have been tackled before he even got near the compound. More on that later.

W are confned to this room from 10am-5pm, monday-saturday. It's pretty sad really, especially with all the sights to see and things to do out there.

This is a view from the roof of our school. Because it's the end of monsoon season, sunny days like this are rare. Even if it's sunny, it does not mean a flash shower could not roll in to spoil our fun.

Flash floods make people pop and lock, check it out.

Dont believe that video? It's true, cows just chill anywhere...