Housewarming, Heaters, and Hostel Football GC Finals: Mar 1 to Mar 6

On the first day of March, I went with Shahnawaz and Akshay to a friend of Akshay’s housewarming party. The family of five was moving into an apartment located a couple neighborhoods away from campus. We took the local train and had to transfer once at Kurla station. We only rode the train one stop after transferring at Kurla, but during this short ride I got the best “Indian Massage” I have had yet. Also called a “Mumbai Massage,” this is an endearing term for the feeling of being incredibly squished while standing up on the train. I have been on crowded buses and subways in the US, but nothing compares to this ride, not even the other crowded rides I have taken in India. My arms were above my head holding onto the handles and it would not have been possible for me to reach into my pockets if I had needed to. Though pickpockets thrive in crowds, it was much too crowded for a pickpocket to be at his best.

The doors on the local trains do not close, so if a train crowded there are at least 3-4 people leaning out of each doorway, holding on with one hand. Indian people like to do this even when the train is not crowded, but it is a necessity when the train is packed. I wonder how many people get injured each day in Mumbai by falling out of moving local trains. I bet the number is huge, but there is no good way to stop it. Closing the doors before the train starts to move is not a realistic option; this would decrease capacity, make the trains moving heaters by restricting airflow, and significantly slow down operations. Sometimes people are stubborn in the US about trying to pack into a train and not allowing the doors to close, but here I do not think even one train would get its doors shut at rush hour, meaning no one would get to work at all, let alone on time. In the US, the train waits to move until everyone is in; in India, the people wait to jump into the train until it starts to move. It is difficult to imagine how this system, which probably causes far more injuries than other countries’ public transit systems, can be changed unless Mumbai quadruples its local train frequency during rush hour so that trains are less crowded.

After getting off at our station, we asked a couple people at the station where the building, a recently-constructed multi-story apartment building, was located. No one seemed to know, and the friend we were visiting had a hard time directing us via the phone. We wandered for over 30 minutes, continuing to ask lots of local people who had no idea where the building was. Due to the building’s recent construction, its address did not yet exist on Google. It is already difficult to find the exact location of a store or building using Google Maps here (it is usually accurate within a couple blocks) but not having this general idea of the location made it increasingly more difficult to find the apartment building. I wonder how the many families that have moved into the building heard about the property and found it initially when they were looking into making a purchase; there must be a better way to locate a new building than the methods we tried to use, but if such a method exists, it remains unknown to me.

After finally finding the building and getting a tour of the new apartment, we had a buffet dinner outside, served at the entrance to the apartment complex. We were the last guests and the hosts ate with us; unless they ate multiple dinners, they had waited until very late to have their dinner to make sure that all their guests ate first. They sent us home with a bag of sweets and bananas. There were two kinds of sweets; bite-sized circles of a milk sweet with some bits of pistachio on top, and a sweet porridge packaged in mini Ziploc bags; this was my favorite and reminded me of sweet Cream of Wheat.

On Saturday, evening Sumit and I went downtown near CST, the main train station, to a market to look for some heaters for my solar roaster prototype. As usual, we had sugar cane juice at a break in our search. Our search for the correct type of heater was unsuccessful, but the more interesting part of our journey was the local train ride on the way downtown. The train that came to Kanjurmarg (station near campus) said “Dadar” on the front. Dadar is a station in the correct direction but not the end of the line—the train was stopping early. I saw and processed this, but did not confirm verbally to Sumit that we would have to change trains at Dadar. We got on the train and eventually got two seats near each other.

We started discussing Sumit’s final project, and just as we were getting into our discussion, the man sitting next to him got up and left the train. “Great,” I thought as I moved so that I was now sitting next to Sumit and we could more easily draw diagrams for one another in my notebook. There was a lot of movement among people on the train at this station, but I thought nothing of it because some stations are always busy. After the train began to move again, something felt wrong, but again I did and said nothing. I figured it felt strange because I had switched sides on the bench. Half an hour later, we were at Vikhroli, one station away from Kanjurmarg. The train had reversed directions at Dadar and we had been too engrossed in our discussion to notice. No wonder the seat had opened up next to him and there was a lot of movement; everybody on the train had gotten off at Dadar except for us. Sumit had also noticed subconsciously that something felt wrong about the way the train was traveling, but did not say anything. One hour after boarding the train, we were virtually back where we had started. We laughed and got on a train going downtown, riding one more hour before finally reaching the market.

Monday was the day of the Football GC (General Championship) final match. We were going up against a team from Hostel 14 which had many good dribblers up front, a solid midfield, and a good defense. I had a header off of our first corner kick that went many feet wide right of the goal. They marked me much closer on each of our other corner attempts and I did not get another good opportunity. It was a hard-fought match but ended 0-0, so we went to penalty kicks. I was the second kicker for my team and made mine. It felt good to bury this one in the back of the net (actually, there is no net on the goal, so it hit a tree many yards behind the goal) because I remember missing two PK attempts during my last year playing rec soccer in Seattle, the last time I played soccer competitively. One kicker from our team missed his attempt wide left, and we lost 5-4. Despite our loss, I am proud to have played on the team and to have won second place in the tournament. My hostel team is a great group of players that welcomed me to join them in the quest for the Football GC championship. I have made many friends by playing on this team and am especially grateful to Abebe for telling me about the team and giving me his spare pair of shin guards and socks so that I could start practicing with the team right away.

As a final note, I recently wrote a piece about airport lounges and was published on Mangoprism.com. If you have not already read it, you can check it out at the following link:

https://mangoprism.com/2017/03/03/finding-a-drink-in-frankfurt-airport-inside-the-lufthansa-senator-lounge/