Mumbai India, Pictures

Click on the following link to see the pictures. I suggest viewing the slide show as lots of the pictures have extra info on them.
>Mumbai Pictures

http://picasaweb.google.com/sarahemoloney/MumbaiIndia#

Well India was a little shorter than I planned on, but these things happen. I had to leave do to health reasons. I was ill right from the beginning not eating or drinking and was very afraid of getting dehydrated and needing an IV, but couldn’t get anything into my system. I believe the big issue was my malaria medication. The sickness and feelings are all side effects of the medication, but the big one was hallucinations and anxiety. I couldn’t sleep at night and my mind was going crazy. In my mind it seems like I was there for a long time. I was not right, some would say I was never right, but then this, oh my god, I was tripping out. I thought Dennis and Carol were there on my shoulder on more than one occasion. Sorry guys no offence but I was not myself.

The malaria medication is very potent and needs to be taken with a full meal and you should be having three full meals a day on it. I would take it when I ate but there wouldn’t be enough in my system to counter balance the side effects, hence my mind was going crazy. I stopped taking the medication and was starting to feel better the day I left, but was worried about being there and not taking the medication. One of those you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t situations. I will have to keep India on the list and return when I am healthy and my system can take the medication.

I did manage to get some site seeing in in Mumbai with Matt and Toula from Melbourne. They were lovely to me. We went with a driver and an employee from the hotel, Nareer on a tour of Mumbai. It was great we got to see a lot of non-tourist spots. We visited at least half a dozen different types of temples, The Gateway of India, Taj Hotel where there were bombings not that long ago. There is no evidence left of any such thing occurring there. We also went to a building were Gandhi lived when he was in India, it is now a museum. We went to the Dhavari Slum, the slum from Slum Dog Millionaire; tourists don’t get to see that. We were welcomed with open arms there; the people kept following us through the lanes. We had quite the entourage. We found out later that some of them thought we were scouting for Slum Dog 2 and kept wanting us to take their pictures. We also got to go to Nareer’s home and had lunch with his family that was awesome. They live in a building on the second floor and have two approx. 8’ x 10’ rooms across a common hall. There is a concrete floor, no furniture, some pots for cooking and a baby basket hanging from the ceiling. Ten people live in this space, three children and seven adults. There was a narrow ladder to climb to a second level where they slept on the floor. It was so cool to get to see their space and eat lunch with them. They were so happy to have us. Nareer has a son 5 and a daughter 12. She was very confident and took us around their neighbourhood. She was proud to show me her math book. She is in year 7 and their high school goes until year 10. In year seven math or at age 12 she was factoring and working with quadratics, for all you mathies following the blog. We toured around the city on a Sunday which was a blessing as most things are shut on Sundays and the traffic wasn’t too bad. It is usually insane.