Mumbai Monsoon

I know I've posted pictures previously of being in Mumbai during the monsoon, but I just can't help myself. There's just something so Indian about walking around the streets of Mumbai during the oftentimes torrential rains of the monsoon - although, obviously, you have to get over your very western sense of cleanliness. Just become one with the rain - lord knows your clothes will. I have so many memories of the monsoon - all the ants of the neighborhood of my apartment in Bandra migrating to my chest in the middle of the night - stepping out into the flooded street because the taxi couldn't go any further, and having a rat big enough to throw a saddle on swim between my legs - being the only professor on campus who didn't cancel class during a particularly bad flood (yes, who saw that coming?). I'll need to talk to my friend Raj sometime and get the details, but I remember one particularly fierce storm where we were trapped in a Persian restaurant, during a Parsi holiday, eating holiday food and trying, and failing, to look outside - the rain was come down so hard that it was like looking through the wrong side of a waterfall. Here are a few pictures of time we spent walking around Mumbai today - on the way to carpet shopping, and before taking off to visit a Hindu temple and a famous mosque (more on that later). We ended up back at the Leopold Cafe again (yes, I am an ex-pat in the making - although my dad swears I'm already an ex-pat since I left Indiana so far behind so completely) and introduced dad and Annie to the wonder that is the mango lassi. I also took a picture of one of the unrepaired bullet holes from the terrorist attack. On a lighter note, I also took a picture of the, sadly unfilled, yard of beer pitchers.