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Monday, day 4 – Consulate visit and Bollywood club hang out

The 4th day in Mumbai and we are getting used to the Indian way of doing things. Today we had our first meeting and as custom goes, a visit to the Swedish Consulate was planned. As mumbai traffic goes its crazy and this day, 3 of us decided to have our first Rickshaw Ride (In other countries called TukTuk), previously only going by Taxi. In the 25 minutes it took us to get to the consulate we ended up sicksacking between cars and trucks on the highway, ignoring all forms of traffic rules (Red lights, whats that?), passing by trafficjams by driving on the pedestrian walkways and last but not least driving against the traffic (!). But of our three cars driving to the consulate, the rickshaw team arrived about 10 minutes earlier, so totally worth it.

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At the consulate we met with the swedish consul Fredrika Ornbrant and with a Swedish journalist active in Mumbai, Jonas Hellman. As it turns out they where married and both the meetings went as one, back to back. They talked about India in General and Jonas especially focused on the Economic development in Mumbai and India and how the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of India will affect India. Fredrika spoke more about Mumbai and regional politics. She also spoke about the elections and how people in general view BJP (Modi’s party) and the Maharashtra (The Indian State that Mumbai lies within) regional party Shiv Sena that BJP is cooperating with. Shiv Sena is a regional patriotic party in favour of Maharashtrian jobs to Maharashtrain people.

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Jonas Hellman mentioned this building as being one of the most expensive building constructed in Mumbai. Unfortunately it is all empty, due to one astrologist’s bad omens about the building.

After the very interesting meeting we had lunch with them both, said goodbye and then headed out for some Mumbai sightseeing combined with shopping.


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We then topped the day of with what we like to call “Anahita goes Bollywood”. We all went to a bar called Ground Zero (no explanation why). But as it turned out, after we being the only people in the place for the whole time, except the 8 people serving us. This was the place where Bollywood stars (according to the owners of course) go for exclusive hang outs and just this last weekend some of them had been in this place and drinking. So all an all a good day.


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/Oscar