Did someone call for Dr Bombay

Well we have arrived in one of India best known cities Bombay now renamed Mumbai, this is a thriving Indian city, with beautiful architecture, wide streets which are cobbled, cheap markets with anything and everything, bars, hip young things and just about everything except good food alas.....

We were very lucky in Mumbai to be put in touch with some young hip things that are up and coming on the Mumbai scene. Trupti a very successful fashion designer and her partner Youri a diamond trader were lovely enough to invite us into their homes and lives and showed us a taste of how the other half lives in Mumbai which is definitely stylishly and very much a jet setter lifestyle Mumbai it seems is the town to party. We also met Trupti's sister Preeti a interior fabric designer and her husband Richard who have the most beautiful home I have ever seen, I am talking something right out of the pages of Vogue Home magazine, open spaces, with sponged walls, wood craved door ways, marble floors antiques carefully chosen and placed.

Thanks to their contacts and advice we found ourselves whisking around the city in search of bargains in tiny alleyways, with strange communities in the middle of nowhere. We went the Chor Bazaar (the thieves market) to look at antiques a long street in the midst of thronging Muslim community where the women wear quaint colourful almost Amish dresses and head covering. We bought a beautiful old light fitting and a 75year old mariners clock, Joanne you would have gone nuts in this place.

Next off to their personal jeweler where we arranged to have our wedding rings made, Greg's turned out beautifully, but mine was the wrong size and could not be fixed so the search continues.

We spent most of our time in Mumbai in an area called Colaba made famous to us be a book we had read before we set off called Shantaram, if you have not read it run out and buy it now. Written by an Australian man (Gregory David Roberts ? I think) it tells the tale of man you broke out of prison in Melbourne, and came to India. He lived the slums, joined the Mafia and became a gun runner among other things. One of the main meeting points in the book is a cafe in Colaba called Leopolds we went there for dinner and although the food was poisonous (to be kind) we did in fact get to see the writer himself and since the book is based on his true story it was very exciting.