Mumbai – day 52

Woke up in a bit of a grumpy mood having had an awful nights sleep. Was feeling a bit homesick too. Mumbai reminds me very much of London except with a much hotter / humid climate so made me feel a bit nostalgic. Spent the morning eating toast, drinking coffee and catching up on Facebook. Jayne did a superb job of trying to jolly me out of my hump, despite her stinking cold, and we left the hotel around 11am to buy train tickets to our next town. Walked for 20 minutes to Central Mumbai station only to realise that we’d forgotten to bring our passports which we needed to purchase our tourist quota tickets – put me back in a weepy bad mood!! Headed back to the hotel to pick up our passports and then went back to the train station. Purchased our train tickets and then realised I had written the wrong date on the request form so had to cancel our tickets and rebook. The day (and my mood) just kept getting worse!! Jayne took me to Starbucks to cheer me up. Had a Christmas red cup but as a frappuchino – it was so weird to have a cold Christmas drink!Headed to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus) station. An extravagant Gothic building built in 1887, it is a mixture of Victorian, Hindu and Islamic styles creating an imposing Daliesque building of buttresses, domes, turrets, spires and stained-glass windows.It also is a UNESCO World Heritage Site so Jayne was super excited to tick another location off the list!  Since I was still feeling homesick , we decided to jumped on the metro from CST station to head to the cinema to watch ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 2’. Was nice to lose myself in the film for a couple of hours! Plus, someone got a bit excited over the advert for the new ‘Star Wars’ film… Guess what we’ll be doing on Christmas Day!!   Headed back on the metro to the hotel, stopping en route to have dinner at the railway cafe. Found a guy on the street corner who would download films onto a memory stick for 20p each. Decided to try it out with ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy to make sure it worked on our netbook and was in English! It did and it was, so we’ll probably head back over to him tomorrow to get some more films to keep us entertained when we need it!

Had a lovely long Skype chat with Clare whilst Jayne watched ‘Godzilla’ on Hindu TV (with a box of tissues for her runny nose – she would be the only person to get a cold in this weather!) before we went to bed, hopefully to get a better nights sleep!!