This weekend we were lucky enough to have some friends visit from the USA! It was so wonderful to have visitors and best of all they gave us an excuse to be tourists in our own city :-) On Saturday we decided to take a trip to Mumbai's most famous laundromat...Dhobi Ghat. This huge open air laundry is where most of the city's clothes are washed, dried, and ironed every day. A dhobi, or washerman, will come to your house every morning to collect your wash and deliver any wash from the previous day. He will then take your dirty clothes; wash them, dry them, and iron them within 24 hours, and return them the next morning. All this for about 6 rupee (10 cents) per piece! We took a local train to the Dhobi Ghat which was also a first. Unbelievably, the local train moves about 6.9 million commuters on a daily basis! Needless to say we opted not to take the train at peak hours. Apparently, if you do so, you will not step onto the train of your own volition, but rather be carried in...bag and all :-). Each train has around a 1,000 person capacity but during rush hour carries somewhere around 4,000 people. Unsurprisingly, there are around 600 deaths each year due to people falling off or out of the train. But safety standards be damned, we took the train and it was quite a pleasant experience! Check out some pics from Dhobi Ghat above.
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