Mumbai, india

The adventure continues to Mumbai, India where the recent demonetization has caused some serious turmoil for most of the country as the economy is 85% cash based and hundreds of millions of people don't even have bank accounts. Line ups were everywhere outside of banks and post offices as people are scrambling to exchange the now useless "old" 500 and 1000 rupee note. I could feel the tension instantly even in the airport terminal where we waited over an hour and a half just to exchange a small amount of money for ourselves. It's not a good time to travel to India so we kept it short and sweet. Our journey from Kathmandu to Mumbai connected through New Delhi and was filled with hours of standing in long leg-panging lines. We were told completely conflicting information by 4 different Indian officials regarding where to go all followed by a head waggle which is used to insinuate a myriad of different inferences. I had a full conversation with a woman in security and all she used to communicate was her head and eyes. It was quite adorable and very understandable. We arrived around 9pm at night and it took an hour and a half for our taxi driver to maneuver down a 3 lane highway (that people drove like there were 5 lanes) for a distance totalling only 30 kilometres. India wasn't as dirty and smelly as I had thought. Although in some areas the smells almost knocked me off my feet. There is extreme poverty right next to massive high rises, and business districts intertwined with shops, tuk tuks filling every free square inch of road space. People have stared a lot at us but are deeply in love with American pop culture and Hollywood so we had a couple people ask to get pictures with us. We both agreed that getting used to Nepal first helped us not be overwhelmed by millions of people and the constant nattering of honks and head waggles. We found a cosy shared apartment using Airbnb and met some amazing British Indians. We then blew a breaker in their home, then locked a door that we weren't supposed to (which resulted in calling a locksmith... face palm). We spent a day getting oriented and then a full day at the Global Vipassana Pagoda which was just a short ferry ride away in Gorai. We used Uber a couple of times as well which was a little more expensive but also quite cool. The food was quite delicious and we didn't get sick as I learned my lesson in Nepal about eating salads. India will be a country to come back to one day.Read more