When we checked into the hotel on Friday night I saw a flier advertising free yoga lessons on Saturday and Sundays at 7am. I forced myself to go to bed at a reasonable time so I could wake up and see how yoga is in India. It reminded me of when I did Tai Chi in Hong Kong last November when we were there for a week.

Just like the tai chi class, I was the only student who showed up for the yoga class which was kind of cool to get my own private lesson. I would definitely say that this class felt more practical than “spiritual” compared to the corepower classes I had back home. There was several minutes of meditation at the beginning and then the instructor counted down after switching to each pose. She asked me if I lifted weights which I thought she was giving me a compliment but she finished the observation with “that’s probably why you’re so inflexible”. She’s not wrong but ouch…

The main event for today was a walking tour of Mumbai. Ketan met us in the hotel lobby at 4 and we drove an hour to South Mumbai. The tour was hosted by Khaki Tours and our tour guide said that he’s a full time lawyer but leads tours purely because of his love for the city and wanting to pass on Indian history and culture to visitors.

The full tour was about 1.25 miles and over 2 hours long. He shared a ton of information, more than I can remember but some of the highlights that stuck in my head:

  • Mumbai consists of 7 separate islands that were joined together to become one land mass
  • It was originally colonized by the Portuguese who then sold it to the British King Charles II as a wedding gift because he thought the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza was too ugly to marry so the islands were given to him as a way to get him to change his mind. He accepted the offer thinking that Mumbai was in Brazil.
  • The Portuguese first called Mumbai Bom Bahia, or Good Bay but the British changed it to Bombay. In Marathi it’s Mumbai and officially became Mumbai in 1995 but many people use it interchangeably.
  • There are a lot of buildings built to mimic British architecture built in the mid 1800s. Some are vacant but cannot be torn down as they are historical but no one wants to buy them either because the property value is so expensive so the government is basically waiting for them to fall down on their own. The building behind us in the group picture is one of those.

One of the buildings we walked by was called the Oriental Building. This was built in 1893 and was intended to be a high school. There are 3 faces on the building: Socrates, Shakespeare, and Plato

I’m really glad that I got a new telephoto lens in the mail a few days before this trip because I was easily able to zoom in and look at the faces up close. Here’s a comparison view of my phone at 1x zoom and my camera at 148mm.

We also walked around Mumbai’s high court building where several armed guards were stationed.

Our guide said that we started the tour where the Europeans first settled and now end the tour at Churchgate which faces the ocean and is where the Europeans left the city.

I typically don’t spend a lot of effort learning history or doing tours when I travel but I really enjoyed this one and learned a lot about a country I knew very little about. Definitely would encourage anyone to do something similar if you come here to India.

After we wrapped up, we drove an hour to a well known restaurant called Nav Chaitanya which specializes in western Indian food which heavily consists of seafood. We all got different dishes of various types of fish, shrimp, and chicken and shared to try a little bit of everything. I noticed all the tables around us were eating with their hands but the waiters gave us spoons and forks. I felt like this was the equivalent of being given a fork at a Chinese restaurant when everyone else is using chopsticks.

At the end we were given little packets of “breath fresheners” kind of like an after dinner mint but these packets were filled with fennel seeds with a candy coating. They tasted like herby nerds candy which was kind of fun.

Tomorrow is Monday and we start a full day of meetings at 10am. I’m really looking forward to meeting people I’ve worked with for over a year in person and build closer personal connections with them.

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