Living Like Bollywood Starlets

Went to Rachel and Wayne's country-club-type place today, which now seems like a totally understandable and necessary investment, rather than a luxury.  It's not very expensive considering the typical Westerner's income, but is out of reach for most Indians.  What you get for the money is a very clean place and a place to get away from the general chaos that is the streets of Mumbai.  Given the shear number of everything -- rickshaws, people, pantsless pooping children -- I imagine it can get really overwhelming if not for places like this.

I will say that all this chaos is incredibly functional, as people seem to be constantly helping each other out, giving directions, and double beeping and making a series of complex head motions while driving to indicate whose turn it is to cram their car wherever there is room for it.  Literally wherever there is room for it; a full bus rubbed up against our car the other day, as it apparently thought there was some more room to fill in.

The club was having a kite festival, but we were sitting more towards the kite graveyard that was the pool area.  Every so often, one would fly overhead and just die, falling into a tree or into the pool.  We could, however, hear all the music and announcements from where we were sitting, such as the announcement about the paper "plate" flying contest (which turned out to be a paper plane flying contest) and all the encouragement for those actually flying kites.  And I just thought that the lyrics to all my favorite Hindi songs were "fly! fly! fly!"...

We did learn a valuable lesson: Ben hates things that are mildly uncomfortable, like being dipped in cold pool water.  William and Ben have that in common.

At one point, a Bollywood star departed the club surrounded by paparazzi.  We, of course, had no idea who this person was, but Cynthia immediately jumped out of her seat with her camera and chased after them, not to take pictures of the celebrity but to take pictures of the paparazzi taking pictures of the celebrity.  Meta.  She then returned and immediately asked if I was going to blog about the incident.  She is so Korean sometimes.

Our non-non-veg Domino's pizzas have arrived, so I'm off.  They called to reconfirm our order, and also delivered in 30-minutes or less (as per their guarantee), neither of which would have happened in New York.  After we eat, Wayne's off to pick Christina up at the airport.  She had to fly economy.  I can't imagine what that must have been like for her.

Monkey sightings: still no change. sad.