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- 21 Jun 09 Mumbai City, Maharashtr...
- 21 Jun 09 Rajkot, Gujarat, India
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Sat 13 March - sanko said
Hi
My name is Favor 23 years old never married. I saw your profile today and after going through it
many times then I made up my mind to contact you as my friend. So I want you to write back to me
through my email address so that I will give you my picture and for you to know who I am.
(favor.karl@yahoo.com)
I hope to see your mail OK, is from me,
Miss Favor.
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Chowpatty Beach - Diary Excerpt
(1 miles)
Anthony -
Tue 26 February 09.00
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!
Anthony -
Wed 11 June 18.00
Clear
This guy had the cheek (and I didn't have the knowledge) to charge me like 10 times the normal price for a massage, and even 'sold' me a 'copper massage' using some kind of copper thingy to rub and massge me.
So this time, of course Chowpatty Beach is always full of Massage people, I turned the game around, and gave some guy a 'Phone massage' (see picture).
It's a bit annoying to be asked whether i want a massage or not every minute, so I just said, sit, I'll give you a massage, and charge you for it - to make a case.
It was quite funny in the end, and unfortunately, he couldn't pay my charges of INR600 for a phone massage, but I let him off ;-)
Anthony -
Tue 26 February 08.00
On the road, a guy wanted to sell some god's blessing to nikesh for a mere 50,000 rupees (about GBP600-700)! To me he kept going on about baksheesh, the donation that shantaram keeps talking about!
Sitting in a restaurant/cafe called the Naval Military Restaurant, when some random women with a child came to sit with us. We didn't really mind her, and the child was cute and laughing, but then she started to beg again, and a waiter asked her to leave... Begging is not good...
On the taxi ride to haji ali mosque, we talked about traffic and why its so messy here, and nikesh raised a good point, saying that thankfully there isn't as much regulation here because it allowed for much better traffic flow. And as I write this, in our taxi, I swear we're driving on the wrong side of the road, as we just claimed another lane ob the other side!
Anthony -
Tue 26 February 09.00
It's an impressive scene, and also an interesting area of mumbai. Since we didn't want to go into the Mosque directly, not sure whether it would have been ok to do that, so we chose to settle at a nearby place by the water with good view onto the mosque.
Over there, we were soon surrounded by several dozens of children, which were very interested in out high tech gadgets, mainly our cameras. Without hesitation, i gave my camera away to one of the guys, who then started playing with it. Nick was a bit more concerned initially, judging by the expression on his face, but was soon convinced for it to be safe. Amazingly, these children, which don't exactly live in air-conditioned appartments, don't steal - why should they!
So they actually took pictures of each other, and were interested to see some of the photos we took. Afterwards, we tried to print off some copies to give to them, but htere was no photo shop nearby. Maybe next time we go to mumbai!
The travellers of 'New York' haven't posted anything public here... yet.
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