So, this past saturday, we went to a Hindustani Classical music concert in the afternoon. There were three dudes on stage playing three different instruments: a tabla (indian drums), a tanpura (4 stringed instrument), and a weird trapezoidal-shaped stringed instrument (let's call it the Trapz) which was played sitting down. To our surprise, the guy playing the Trapz was amazing. I mean, he literally was plucking more than 10 strings per second while the guy playing the tanpura was 1 string every 4 secs. It was hilarious when they were all tuning and the Trapz guy suddenly took the tanpura from the other guy and tuned it for him. Another funny thing about Indian concerts is that people in the audience, to show their appreciation for the music, perform very weird actions. For example, this bald uncle (all indian adults are uncles to us), who was sitting down in front of the performers, started nodding his head as if he was saying "no, this is terrible" and putting his hand out w/ his palm face up (as if to say, "what is this piece of crap?!?!"). However, the nodding of the head, as we all found out later, means "great job", and bringing the hand out demonstrates the audience member's acclamation for the music.
Later, we went to a restaurant called Trisha's in some dark alley near the Mumbai Stock Exchange which supposedly had very expensive seafood. Now, after two weeks of living in Mumbai, any food dish above 100 rupees seems very expensive to V and I. So we thought the seafood in here must cost no more than 400 Rs. max. Well, let's just end by saying my first experience with eating both king crab and lobster ended up costing me more than 1500 Rs. I left the restaurant feeling like there was a huge hole in my pocket. Anyways, that's my weekend update. V's been doing a good job posting about what we've been doing so I'll chime in once in a while. Just so you guys know, here are some recent pictures from a news site covering the Mumbai floods:
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