Bombay Intro

Hey you, welcome to this blog. If you are English or speak any other language than my mother tongue, just so you know, the title means "Wild Industrial Plant" and if you want to know why (and this also applies to my Dutch friends), all I can say now that it's a rather long story. But send me an email and I will gladly explain.

For all my Dutch friends, please excuse me for writing this blog in English. I considered for a while to write in both languages but I figured that this would kind of be unfair to the rest (and to my girlfriend!)

So here I go. I've been in Bombay now for almost four weeks and I am getting settled in. I am staying in an apartment in Andheri West, a suburb of Bombay, about 20km north of the city center. I am staying here with on average 14 other trainees from all over the world. There are three apartments here, 2 on the 6th floor and one on the 15th. They all have 2 bedroom, no airco -- but one or two fans to keep us cool -- and 5 or 6 beds. So if you do the math, it means that yes, there are people supposed to sleep in the living room. At least, that was my fate when I first arrived here. Since then some people moved out and I moved up the pecking order. Now I occupy a bed in one of the bedrooms.

Currently there are three Chinese girls staying in my apartment and one Russian guy who just moved in. In the other apartments there are trainees from the Czech republic, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Peru and Austria. But our community is always changing.

Everyday I take a rickshaw from my apartment to Andheri station and travel from there with the train to Churchgate, one of the two terminals in South Bombay. From there it is about a 10 minute walk to my work.

I know all these details aren't terribly interesting, but it is just to make a start and to create some spatial orientation. These are just the basic ingredients. Everything from here on will be more spicy, colourful and eh... entertaining. Bombay as an experience is such a sensery overload that if you don't hold on to these simple outlines, you'll freak out. And believe me, plenty have.