Mumbai

Sunday July 20

We had a great tour of the city by our awesome tour guide Parvene who was very knowledgeable and pleasant. We observed some very British architecture and visited the Victoria Terminus Railway Station. On pillars at the entrance was a lion depicting Britain and a tiger for India. The station could have been Paddington Station in London.

We visited the beautiful campus of Mumbai University. What a pleasure it must be to study here.

Parvene, whose religious affiliation is Parsi, a group of people who left Persia when it was invaded by Arabs, took us to where her people took their dead. This land is prime real estate on the top of a hill and it houses 4 towers where the dead are placed for the vultures to come and eat them. They believe it is the last special thing they can do. However, now there are no vultures due to them eating animals that had DDT, other birds such as hawks do the deed as well as the people scattering limestone to help the bodies deteriorate. Well it does save on burial costs!

After a brief visit to the Prince of Wales Museum to see my relatives (as Jill Ji calls them,) several of us embarked upon a boat to Elphanta Island to see the caves housing huge sculptures relating to the Hindu gods. We really enjoyed the climb up to the caves but it was sweltering hot as usual and we must have lost pounds in perspiration. On our return to the mainland, however, we were sat on the wrong side of the boat and got splashed many times much to the amusement of the other visitors.

I am always amazed how important education is to the Indian culture. We met a young man who had just returned from Russia where he is studying to be a doctor. People will travel all over the world if the scholarship is a good one. Nearly all of the adults we have met have shared with us how much they worry at 10th grade due to the BIG test they take here to qualify them for advanced level and entry test to college in 12th grade. It is so hard to get into universities and many students go to school then take 2 – 3 hours tutoring in an evening just to give them an edge.