Before arriving in Mumbai, former Bombay, we were slightly intimidated by all those stories about crowds and annoyances, chaotic traffic, and mountains of garbage. What we found instead is a comparably modern, dynamic, safe and lively city. In the center, there is far less dirt than for instance in Chennai, and traffic is flowing remarkably well for one of the five biggest cities in the world. Mumbai is the economic heart of India, generating 33% of all Indian income tax and the undisputed trade gateway, accounting for 40% of Indian foreign trade. On the other hand, Mumbai has also some of the biggest slums in the world.
For the first time in India, we had the pleasure to just walk around a city, as there are some sidewalks! The capital of the state of Maharashtra offers a large variety of quarters. We walked through Colaba with its many hotels, Victorian churches and Government buildings to the famous Gateway of India monument and found “Shantaram’s” Café Leopold.
We roamed through the busy street market district noth of old Victoria Terminus, the bourgeois neighbourhood close to Chowpatty Beach, skyscrapers with sea view for the very well off on Malabar Hill and Juhu Beach, and suburbs like Bandra for the young middle class, where a pitcher of beer costs as much as in New York.
Mumbai is in several aspects different from the rest of India, especially from the rural areas. Cost of living as well as wages are particularly high. There is a variety of restaurants and art galleries, and Mumbai’s Bollywood is the biggest movie engine in the world. Even if there were the usual primitive stares by men, women seemed to dress in a bit more casual style.
We were fascinated by the economic efficiency of Mumbai’s inhabitants, for instance in the slums which generate hundreds of millions of dollars with waste recycling. There is frantic washing near the Mahalaxmi station at the Dhobi Ghats, where a big part of Mumbai’s laundry is processed in the open. 
The famous “Dhaba-wallahs” deliver lunch parcels collected from all over the city to hundreds of thousands of office personnel every day. Rarely any of the home-cooked meals (less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries) ever misses its recipient thanks to a colour-coded system mark on the top of the tiffin boxes, a ingenious logistic system which was even admired by billionaire Richard Branson and Prince Charles.
All in all we liked Mumbai a lot, even if we would not like to live there. 25 million people is just too many!
