Reality Tours

Last month I found myself in Mumbai at the end of my (too short) trip to the amazing country of India.

The seawall along Marine Drive is a lovely walk and a great place to view the sunset. We stayed in a business / boutique hotel in a quiet part of town.






On our last day in India we booked a tour of the Dharavi Slum with Reality Tours. This slum is one of four in Mumbai. It is a city within a city. Approximately the same population as Calgary (1 million +) live in an area 1.7sq km. You aren't allowed to take photos in the slum but if you saw the movie Slum Dog Millionaire - this is the slum that was featured.

We met our guides at Churchgate train station and took a thirty minute train ride to the slum entrance. The first part of the tour takes you through the heavy industry area. All sorts of things are recycled and sold. We saw plastic being melted down, dyed, and made into pellets. The pellets are shipped to China where they will be made into plastic lawn furniture etc. In one factory, men were recycling oil cans. First they burned away the oil inside in giant furnaces, then they hammered out the dents in the cans, and finally polished them up to look like new. Nobody was wearing masks although the fumes were toxic.

Further inside is the residential area. Most homes are sheds about 21m sq. In one home there were five family members and three renters living there. The slum only got running water a few years ago and there are two outhouses to serve two thousand people.

We visited a school where an English class was in progress. The students were a blend of Hindu and Muslim. Everyone is co-existing peacefully now - in the 90's tensions were high and riots were common. Some of the other industries in Dharavi include pottery, leather, soap, and poppadom making.

This tour was shocking, enlightening and really worthwhile. I came away with an appreciation for all that I am lucky enough to have. I'm a "glass is half-empty" type but I came away with a new perspective.

So - if you do go to Mumbai, take the tour!

www.realitytoursandtravel.com

SLEEP NO MORE

Yesterday night, I attended a production of "Sleep No More." This was a fantastic sensory and theatrical experience and very hard to explain.

The British theatre company that puts on this show is called Punch Drunk and the show is based on Shakespeare's Macbeth.

We arrived at the McKittrick Hotel at 7:45 and were led into the fabulous Manderley Bar. A place that looked a lot like Twin Peaks' One Eyed Jack's brothel. The drink of choice in this bar is absinthe - you will need a shot of courage before entering this place so why not the green fairy?




I was immediately seperated from my companion  and taken into  a "briefing" room with a group of people. We were all given a white mask to wear for the preformance and told not to speak for the duration of the show. Then the group was taken into an elevator and enters the show. Basically the idea is to explore the set (which is the entire McKittrick Hotel) on your own and to create your own theatrical experience.

 It was creepy, macabre, and dreamlike. I wandered through rooms of clawfoot bathtubs, hospital beds, a forest of dead branches and taxidermied animals, a cemetary with eerie statuary...
You are encouraged to open drawers and search through files, even eat candy in the candy store if you chose. As you explore you will encounter actors who enact key scenes from Macbeth silently but through hyperkinetic dance moves.

Macbeth and Lady MacBeth plotting murder, the three witches (crazy strobe lights and a naked man with the head of a goat) and the dinner where MacBeth sees the ghost of the murdered king.







After the show you can retire to the Manderley bar, listen to some jazz and blues, have a drink and try to process all that you just saw.

Here's the website for the production: www.sleepnomore.com