How to Experience a New City

I just got back from spending the weekend in downtown Mumbai. I live north of Mumbai in a suburb called Virar. There is a train that goes directly from Virar to downtown Mumbai, with different stops in the city starting after about an hour. It takes about an hour and a half to get to the furthest downtown point. As such, I found a cheap hostel and spent the whole weekend exploring and checking out some good restaurants and museums.

After spending lots of time in lots of different cities, there are a few things that I have found that allow me to better understand the city and make the most of my time there.

1. Learn about the city from locals: This can take shape in several forms, but I have found two to be particularly useful. The first is by visiting a museum about the city. I have done this in Shanghai and Mumbai. In both cases, it gave perspective to development, and helped explained certain cultural elements. The second is by taking a walking tour. These will be given by locals who are usually younger and grew up in the city. I took two in Hong Kong. It was great to have someone to ask questions to. It was also super interesting to observe the differences in how my two tour guides viewed and spoke about China. One of my guides identified as being Hong Kongese, whereas the other identified as being Chinese; an important dispute about the Hong Kong people.

2. Use forms of transport that expose you to the city: This one can be hard depending on your budget and the city you are but can be one of the most useful. If you are going a short distance, try to walk and find a route that exposes you to backstreets; these can tell you so much about the culture of a city. Google Maps is a great way to get walking directions, and they usually have routes that include alleyways and backroads. If you are going a longer distance, then try taking an uber or taxi. While the metro is great, it is usually below distance and doesn’t allow you to see your surroundings. Public buses can be great but tend to be a little less dependable in regard to timing and route. Being able to look out the window can help you identify neighborhoods that you want to explore.

3. Put effort into finding good restaurants beforehand: This is something that I hold close to my heart. If you only have a few days in a city, you might only get to have a handful of meals, so you want to make sure they are good. Lack of planning can lead you to find something close and miss out on a specialty or just a damn good meal. In Hong Kong, I ate at three different Michelin starred restaurants (all under $15 a meal). I had an incredibly time there and would largely associate that with the delicious food I had. Eating local food is an easy way to experience the culture and finding the right restaurant can allow you to do it alongside locals.

4. Do some research: It doesn’t matter if this involves doing a quick google search or buying the Lonely Planet guide, it’s going to help you out. Most people visit a city with the intention that they won’t come back, or at least not for a while. As such, you want to make sure that you don’t miss out on anything. When planning a trip, one of the first things I do is search “ # day itinerary for (insert city name).” What will pop up are hundreds of sample plans for how to spend your time there. Look through a few and figure out which attractions are close to each other and which are worth visiting. You are going to prefer to spend time planning beforehand, rather than while you’re there, so do yourself a favor and put the time in in advance, and then explore and enjoy while you are there.

While every trip should be unique and specific to the location that you are visiting, keeping these things in mind has allowed me to have a number of great trips with very little regrets in each place.

My Daily Schedule

So my second week in India is coming to a close, and I’m still unsure of how to feel about this place that I’m living. I’ll be here for 8 weeks, so it’s completely fair to think of it as my Home. However, juxtaposed to that idea is the fact that I don’t have a dresser in my bedroom and so I’m living out of a suitcase. This makes things feel very temporary. Regardless of this, my life is relatively stable.

Every morning, I wake up at 8 and shower, make a few notes about my precious day, catch up with friends and listen to a podcast about the news. I then pay 8 rupees ($0.12) to take a rickshaw with my two roommates to the office. It takes about 5 minutes and we all get squished in the back seat together.

When we get to work, we go and head into the conference room. Once there, office assistants, or more disparagingly called “Chai Boys,” come and ask what we want for breakfast. We have the same thing everyday: A bottle of water, a cup of coffee, some coconut and chocolate biscuits, and bananas. This will take about half of an hour.

After breakfast, at around 11, we begin our respective projects. Last week, we were all working together to analyze sales data from the electronics store that VIVA owns to find sales patterns. We then presented our findings to the store manager.

Recently, I’ve started meeting with the Real Estate Development division to understand what projects they are undertaking. As part of this, I’ve met with project managers, salesman, contractors and regulators. I’ve also done site visits to check out VIVA properties. One of the apartment complexes consist of 11 16-story buildings that are currently under construction.

At around 2, the office assistants will bring us lunch. Lunch is usually rice and dal, chapatis, some kind of dip, vegetable sandwiches, and then pineapple juice. The real winner is the pineapple juice. It’s fresh squeezed and comes with a thick layer of pineapple foam on top. Definitely the highlight of office lunches.

After lunch, we get back to work until about 7. At this point, we leave and go to my bosses private gym to workout. The gym is massive (probably close to 3,000 square feet) and we usually have it all to ourselves.

Then at 8:30, we go to my bosses house for dinner. We usually have a say in what they make, but is mostly Indian food. The other day we got them to make chicken sandwiches, which they did a pretty good job with, despite not wanting to make for us. They don’t think that it’s good to eat meat for dinner, and so most dinners are vegetarian.

We then return to our apartment via rickshaw around 9:30. At this point we shower off and hang out for the rest of the night.

This cycle repeats itself from Monday through Saturday with some slight variations for different projects. It’s definitely a different experience than working in the U.S., but I’m very thankful to have been given this opportunity to understand how business environments can differ.

First days in India

I had never been to India before, and certainly never imagined that I would come here before visiting Europe, yet here I am, sitting in a conference room in the suburbs of Mumbai, writing this blog.

I arrived in Mumbai on Saturday, July 7^th. June through August are monsoon season, and I experienced this almost instantly. The rain poured down like nothing I had seen before. On the drive to my apartment that first night, it was tough to even see out the front windshield. I saw a card that had completely flipped over, most likely because of a combination of the rain, and the overly aggressive habits of Indian drivers. While if you simply judged people based on their driving style, you would think it was every man for themselves, yet this was juxtaposed by the fact that ten vehicles stopped after seeing the overturned car and then jointly helped to flip it back so that it was on its wheels. Everyone then got back in their cars and continued driving as though nothing had happened. To me, it was all a little bit of a shock.

On Sunday afternoon, I, along with my two Italian roommates and several other employees at VIVA group, the company I am working for, left for a six-hour drive to Pune. Pune is the 9^th largest city in India, but that wasn’t why we were going. We were going for Pandharpur Wari, or Wari. Wari is a pilgrimage made every year by farmers who live in Maharashtra (the state that Mumbai is in) from their home town to the temple in Pandharpur. They walk all day, and then seek shelter at night from organizations and people who volunteer their space. My boss was funding a dinner, and so we went to help serve around 1,500 of these pilgrim’s food. It was fun to be a part of these people’s holy journey and know that we were helping them along the way.

The next day, we went and gave out soap and snacks to the farmers, in an effort to help them persevere. This event had less of a positive vibe. Since we were giving these things away for free, many people became greedy and tried to take more than what they were allocated, at times becoming violent. It really puts things into perspective when these people are struggling to afford something as simple as soap. We gave out items to a few thousand people, and then hung out for a few hours and simply watched people walk past. We then headed back to Mumbai.

The rain between Saturday and Tuesday was described by some of my coworkers as the “worst rainstorm they had seen in 15 years.” Roads were flooded, trains weren’t running, restaurants and offices were closed, electric and cell phone service were down, and the city shut down. It was truly incredible simply how much rain was coming down from the sky.

On Wednesday, I went in to the office and got to meet some of the employees, but many still were not able to make it to work because of work and train closures. In the afternoon, I took a trip downtown with my roommates, another intern who is here and two of my boss’s assistants. We went to the Gateway of India and got to see the Taj Mahal Palace, the most famous hotel in Mumbai. We got lucky in that it did not rain for the whole afternoon. We then went to a kebab restaurant for dinner.

The food here has been pretty good. I get provided breakfast, lunch and dinner every day by my office. It is usually coffee and biscuits for breakfast. Then for lunch and dinner we will have chapati or roti with a potato-based dip and a chickpea-based dip that you eat with the bread. It is filling and makes life easy when all I have to do is show up at work and I get fed.

The working environment is much different in India than elsewhere. Because most people have to travel a long distance to get to work, the office hours are 10:30 AM to 7:00 PM, Monday through Saturday. The employees in my office are all either family or friends and tend to be very close. While almost everyone speaks English, most meetings are held in Hindi. The office also has several assistants who will bring food or drinks to you at your request. I can bring my dirty laundry to the office and I will get it back in three days’ time, washed and pressed. It’s different, but it focuses largely on hospitality, which makes it a very inviting environment.

I have several weeks ahead in Mumbai, but so far it has been an incredibly cultural experience. I got to travel to another city, go to a temple, visit several landmarks in Mumbai and have managed to eat my meals solely with my right hand.