Mumbai India

April 15^th,
Mumbai, India

After departing Cochin we sailed for a day on the Arabian Sea.  We arrived in Mumbai early on the morning of April 15^th.  We had booked a tour that included a visit at a Jain temple. This religion is famous for a few different things, they will not kill anything living therefore they are strict vegetarians and many will not wear leather and even silk as the silk worm has to be killed to get the silk.  They are also famous for leaving their dead bodies out for the vultures to eat because they believe that digging in the soil will kill insects.  In Mumbai they
place their dead on a hill and let the bodies decompose and the birds eat them.

We also visited the Dhobi Ghat.  This is a large area where hundreds of people wash clothing for most of the local residents.  It uses water that flows through open sluices and the washermen beat the clothing on concrete pads and then hang them on lines to dry.  There
are hundreds of lines full of clothing. The cost to have your clothes washed is around a dollar a pound and this includes pickup and delivery.

 We were also supposed to see the famous lunch box men of Bombay but unfortunately they
were all away on a religious holiday. They are called the Dabbawallahs, every work day they leave downtown Bombay in the morning to pick up hot lunches from the wives of the Indian men that left the suburbs for work downtown around 7:00am.  The wives prepare the hot  meals and the Dabbawallahs pick them up and deliver them to the husbands at their offices
downtown by noon.  They then return for the boxes around 13:00 and return them to the wives for cleaning and refilling the next morning.  There are over 25,000 lunches delivered and they have an error rate of less than one in a million.  This has resulted in the system
they use, which is hundreds of years old, being given a Sigma 6 rating.  The system and procedures used have also been studied by Harvard Business School. 

Upon return to the ship we sailed for Muscat Oman scheduled to arrive April 18^th.