Chowpatty Beach


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Other Posts in this area:
Chowpatty Beach - Diary Excerpt (1 miles) Chowpatty Beach - Always good to chill out (1 miles) Day 3 in Mumbai (1 miles) Haji Ali Mosque (1 miles)
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Chowpatty beach, mumbai - Note 1

Anthony - Tue 26 February 09.00
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Chowpatty Beach - Diary Excerpt

Anthony - Tue 26 February 09.00
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Back to town, we went to Chowpatty Beach, a beach inside a megacity! The water is not exactly inviting to bathe in it, but the sand is soft, warm and clean. Lots of people here, couples and families. People are offering massages, rides in toy cars and mats to lie on, all kinds of snacks and of course chai!

Its nice how people just come here to relax and be (with their family), children play with kites!

So the beach is a bit like an oasis inside the buzz of the Megacity, and really, it's such a pleasant place to be! Such a pleasant place!

The sun is setting slowly behind two skyscrapers under construction, and the scene is just idyllic. I think if i lived in Mumbai, i would go to Chowpatty Beach regularly, just to relax and let go.

People make a living from anything, such as charging people to push around their children in little toy cars. And guess what, i've been pushing a toy cart around with this one boy who looked rather weak and always got the steering wrong. I was hoping that with my help, the foreigner, he would get more customers and at the same time have some help pushing the car through the sand. Unfortunately, it didnt quite work out, and so i left him to continue his business after several failed approaches to people with children. Was worth a try!

Then, of course, i had a Massage on the beach, which was actually more of a painful but somehow meant to be pleasant torture... So this guy, 18 years old with 8 years of massage experience used his hands of steel and rock to squeeze every part of my body. And i would have loved to see my face, omg. Lying there in the sand, pulling faces in excruciating pain... He also kept offering 'Hotel massages'... which I kindly refused, although i never asked what exactly that entails... This guy was also one of the first ones to properly rip me off in India. After like 20mins of massage, he wanted to have Rs1000, which is like GBP13, and not that much considering, in case you wanted to pay for some 20mins of pain, but for local standards, that's just a ripoff. Rs1000 for 20min massage is like an hourly wage of Rs3000, ok, let's average that out to some times of inactivity, and you still make Rs1500 per hour on average. A rickshaw driver makes about Rs300-500 a day. A DAY! so i ended up arguing and negotiating, and paid him Rs650 i think. At the end of the day, god knows what his hands of steel would have done to me or my wallet had we not been able to agree on some price.

Before leaving the beach, we had some 'Bani Puri', which are fried spheres/shells of something (looks like a spherical round crisp/chip, probably made from some peak dough or so) filled with beans and some other liquid. It feels quite funny when you put these eye ball shaped things filled with green pea soup like things into your mouth and first chew it, but it's actually quite nice and tasty! No real meal though, because you'd need hundreds to get full!

But wow, Chowpatty Beach, what a nice place!
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