sightseeing day 2

I realized that I never talked about my second day of sightseeing in Mumbai, I got so distracted by Divali. Well, my second day of sightseeing I did a self-guided walking tour through the city. There aren’t many big must see sights in Mumbai, just lots of smaller sights. The biggest thing that I noticed while walking through was the influence of the British. There was one place in particular where you really would think that you were in Europe; there was a statue of a man on a horse just like you would see in Europe, and the building behind it had very western architecture. It was very odd, sort of like being in two cities at the same time. It was all very pretty, but at the same time I felt like you could see the negative side of the British...in the area where they had built it was really beautiful but the rest of the city was kind of well, not nice. It felt as though the British wanted their lives to be comfortable and didn’t care much about the Indians. Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about the time the British were here so I don’t know what it was like and I could be completely wrong; I'm just saying that is the way it looks.
One thing that was kind of nice about Mumbai is that people didn’t really pay attention to me…but in a good way. It is a big city and people have places to go and people to see, kind of like NYC, so they don’t find seeing a foreigner like me walking around interesting. It isn’t that I didn’t get any stares, but about ¼ the amount I would get other places. I liked that.
Anyway, during my walk I discovered a lovely little botanical garden (I changed the welcome picture on my blog to have a picture from that garden). It was full of people enjoying their lunch breaks. There was also a big square with the high court on one side and a big grassy area in the middle. The grassy area was filled with people playing cricket. I never thought of cricket as being a very difficult sport but they take it quite seriously here and are pretty athletic about it. It was fun to watch for a while. I still don’t get the sport at all but I figure that I’ll learn about it soon enough. Then one final stop at the Train station which is really huge and very gothic and very cool.
And after 3 hours of being outside in the sun I was melting (thanks to my hat I didn’t have a headache though) so I went back to the hotel and jumped in the pool. All in all I would say that Mumbai is a cool place to visit if you are in the area, but probably not one of must-see of the sights in India…at least for me. But I already have other place in and around the city I'd like to see if I go back.