Greetings from incredible India! I promised a full blog post today, but the tour I am on with Indian Woven Travel has been one of the most wonderful, intense, crazy, action packed experiences of my life, with precious little time to write. So I shall just be sharing the first day spent in Mumbai, which was a pretty amazing start to my journey...
Stop 1 - Dhobi Ghat
Our first stop was visiting the Dhobi Ghat - which is considered the world's biggest open-air laundry with thousands of ‘pen’ wash areas operating daily. It was built during British colonial rule in 1890 to serve hotels, hospitals, and British officials, and it’s still in continuous use today.
The laundry work is done by the Dhobi community, and the spaces are passed down through families over generations.
An estimated 100,000+ garments and linens are washed, beaten, dried, and pressed every day! Each customer’s laundry is coded, tracked, and returned accurately with few mistakes ever made. When systems work in India, they really work well.
Stop 2 - Dabbawalas
Our second stop was to meet the Dabbawalas, who offer a lunch delivery network which has existed since 1890. Around 5,000 Dabbawalas deliver roughly 200,000 lunchboxes every weekday, picking them up from homes in the morning and returning empty boxes in the afternoon.
They use a simple yet effective colour-coded and symbol system on lunchboxes that tells workers where each box came from, and where it should go. Apparently Harvard Business school has studied the system because of its high efficiency and low error rate! The Dabbawala in the picture above was the very camp and wonderful head of the union, and he loved to be photographed!
Stop 3 - Lunch at Britannia
This is a famous Parsee restaurant which has food with a Persian influence. This sign had us all hooting with laughter. I think I shall copy it and put it in my shop.
Stop 4 - The Spice Market
After lunch we headed to the famous spice market. We saw women cleaning up Kashmiri chillies ready to be turned into powder by deafening machines, and watched (coughing and spluttering) as huge bags of spices were roasted in an iron pan on an open fire.
Kashmiri chillies are used for their rich, beautiful orange colour, which was flying everywhere, and was all over everyone’s hands and feet.
Families have their own spice mixes blended to order, which they will tick off on this list.
Stop 5 - Victoria Terminus
Our final stop for the day was Victoria Terminus which is apparently deemed to be the ‘second most beautiful station in the world’. Which is the first, I hear you ask? Well, the assessor clearly had Victorian Gothic taste as it is St Pancras station!
Rudyard Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was principal of the Bombay School of Art and he and his students designed all the animals which adorn the station. These were apparently the inspiration for Rudyard’s classic story, The Jungle Book.
Our last activity for the day was to jump on a train and go for a ride to the suburbs with the train doors wide open throughout the journey!
I can’t believe this was just day one! Stay tuned for more next week - next stop, Ahmedabad!
