WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE RAINEY AND ZOE: Mumbai Magic PLUS crisis PLUS crisis averted

Today started with a 2AM crisis phone call that the teens (who were leaving Houston today) had been thrown a curve ball… their Qatar Airways flight was 5 hours delayed and they were going to miss every connection from Doha to Mumbai to Chennai to Madurai… Yikes !!!! And here I had been worried about the in-country India flights being delayed or canceled and they hit this road bump right off the bat ... on the very first leg. Luckily my office, i.e. Gabby and Natasha, were on their game and were able to re-route the group and get us all back on track. If everything works as it is now planned, we will end up only 6 hours off-schedule but still in Madurai by tomorrow evening (All fingers and toes crossed for that one).

Photo of Eileen Knight and the 6 teens who were stuck at Houston's airport for an extra 5 hours before even leaving on the trip. Safe travels to you all. Can't wait to see you in India

By 5AM, the group of us already in India were in the lobby to meet our tour guide for the Mumbai at Dawn adventure. It was great. We basically followed the path of many of the city’s supplies and goods and saw how they were distributed.

We started in the fish market… a true sensory wake-up call. And since I got slimmed by a passing eel, I took the fish market smell with me for the rest of the day. If you’re not sure what a walk-by-eel-slimming entails, it occurs when a man with a 6 foot long eel, thrown over one shoulder, passes close enough to you that the eel oozes eel juices all down your back and legs on its way to the auction block. Yuck, yuck and triple yuck.

Next up was the newspaper sorters … a process where men sit on the sidewalk and sort the 28 daily Indian newspapers into delivery piles: think various languages, religions and focuses and the variety of newspapers starts to make sense. The sorted piles correspond with how the papers are to be delivered. And all without any checklist or bar code or written system of any kind. Indeed, 95% of the newspaper sorters are illiterate, they just remember their route and what papers each family takes.

The sorted newspapers are piled - literally 4 to 5 feet high - on bicycles and the delivery process starts

Then a quick stop for a cup of Chai Masala tea from a roadside stand. Hot, sweet and exactly what we needed.

And then the chicken market… where we watched the chickens being unloaded and taken into the butcher booths. The men can carry 40-50 chickens at a time… all upside down and tied at their feet.

Next the green vegetable market where this man begged me to “click” him (apparently the Hindi catch phrase for “please take my photograph”).

And the flower market. What colors and smells

Each garland, used at the temple, takes more than 30 minutes to make by hand and sells for just 22 cents. How can any country compete with that kind of hourly wage?

Quick stop for curry snack from a vendor. Spicy, spicy

Then a close view of the Dabbawallas… the men who deliver hot lunches to offices from the business men’s wives in the suburbs. Apparently it is considered demeaning for a man to carry his lunch to work (or his lunch box home at the end of the day)… who knew? So an entire industry has sprung up where wives cook a hot lunch, package it up in a padded carrier and men pick up the lunch, delver it to the husband’s office and come back an hour later to pick up the empty container and return it to the suburbs. Again, the Dabbawallas use no lists, no bar codes, no written instructions and the containers do not have even any address or name tag on them… yet tens of thousands of hot lunches are delivered between 12:30 and 1PM each day. A wonder of organization and memory.

And on to Dhobi Ghat … a washing institution where men scrub clothes with thick bars of soap and then stand in knee high water and rinse - all by hand – the laundry of this city.