We spent another couple days in Mumbai before leaving for Korea to do some shopping. Thankfully our train ride in was not 48 hours, it was 26. Derek blames the Lonely Planet book, I'm just very thankful he was mistaken.
Most of the tourist hotels downtown are near the Taj hotel, so up and down the main road there are tons of tourist shops and the sidewalk is lined with stalls. We wandered around and did some shopping, and there was one women, just off to the side, who I noticed last time we were in Mumbai who was still in the same spot. She sets up her stall before anyone else, and shuts it down last and she sleeps beside it at night. There are a number of people who sleep on the streets, but she stood out in my mind partly because clearly everything she has for sale is trash she's cleaned up, and I never saw her sell anything, but also because she has befriended a fat street dog who sleeps curled up beside her. And one night, when it got cold... she put a t-shirt on the dog. Fine. You win this round old woman. I wandered over to buy something from her and poked around the broken jewelry and dirty scraps of clothes before choosing a piece. She said it was 70 rupees, I offered her 40 and bought it and as we were walking away Derek was like ... what the hell?
I don't know what happened. I was trying to treat it like an actual shopping experience and we'd been bargaining all day, so I guess it was like a knee jerk thing, but seriously, who goes to buy some garbage from an old street person and offers them less money. Arrrg. I suck at this.
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3 comments:
You're a wonderful person. You helped because you wanted to, but didn't condescend to her by just throwing money around.
You couldn't have sucked less.
That's an awessome story!! It's probably something I would have done too!
Does this mean you were around for Holi?
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