Hello again, blogonauts! And greetings from Mumbai, India!

My first day in India, under the expert guidance of my friend Zoe, has been spectacular. (I urge you to peruse through some of the photos that were uploaded along with this blog entry.)

I ignored my hefty jet lag, and we embarked on a day-long trek through some of the cultural depths of this city and culture.

We began by ambling through Dhobi Gillis ... err ... Dhobi Ghat, which is one of the slums where residents earn their living hand-washing other people's laundry. With 16 million residents, Mumbai creates a lot of dirty clothes.

Dozens of waist-deep concrete vats fill what seems like a half-acre central courtyard. Surrounding this work area are the residents' homes, or "hutments," which are stories-high single-rooms. Each one can house whole families. Access to upper hutments is by steep stairways, which more closely resemble ladders.

Outside each of the surrounding hutments (and atop their roofs) hung long curtains of drying laundry. Whites, colors, and vast numbers of blue jeans all hung separately, creating enormous monochrome brush strokes in an abstract art work.

From there, we made our way to Sassoon Docks, a large fishing neighborhood. The colors of the fishing boats and their flags were almost as intense as the smell of over-ripe seafood. Where fish are, so too will there be scavenging birds and cats.

We ate lunch (for me, vegetable curry rice) at Leopold Cafe, a restaurant famous for its history as a Mafia gathering place. Bullet holes in the interior are still visible in the dining room.

We then wandered through the aging BLBs, or Buildings Left by the British. These stately Victorian offices and apartments line many of the streets in the vicinity of the Gateway of India arch. (More on that to come.)

We returned to Zoe's apartment so I could catch a nap, then strolled through a garden maintained by owners of local apartment buildings. We finally ate at a local restaurant that Zoe assured me was unaccustomed to seeing white customers. Our entire dinner for two cost about $5.

This will do for an initial entry. Your words for today, should you wish to give Wikipedia your business, are "hutment," Sassoon Docks, and Leopold Cafe.

Enjoy looking at the photos, and I will blog to you later!