Haji Ali mosque and Dhobi Ghat (pictures)
So a friend is in town for a few days and I was showing him around the local sites in our neighborhood, and got some pictures I thought I'd share.
This is Hajji Ali mosque and tomb, on an island in the Worli Bay. It was built in 1431 for Sayyed Peer Haji Ali Shah Bukhara, a merchant from what is now Uzbekistan who settled in Mumbai and set up an import-export business, before selling all of his possessions to do the Hajj and become a hermit.
The island is about a quarter mile out into the bay, and is connected to the island of Mumbai by a causeway. The causeway is submerged in high tide, so there is a strict schedule of when people can go out there and when they have to leave. (And the tide comes in fast in Mumbai, so if a police officer says you have to leave, he means you need to leave right this second.)
This is the mosque from up close, at the end of the causeway (we didn't go in because we were both wearing shorts, but it is totally tour-able -- honestly I doubt if they would have cared that we were wearing shorts, but it's still just not appropriate IMO).
It's the tail end of "Indian summer" in Mumbai, which means it's about 95 degrees right now. It being so hot, we stopped at the famous Haji Ali Juice Center back on the mainland. I had pineapple juice; he had jackfruit in evaporated milk.
The other nearby attraction is the Dhobi Ghat, a large open-air laundry that cleans most of the commercial linens in Mumbai (think tablecloths and sheets in hotels). They used to also do most personal laundry, but smaller laundromats have taken that market over in recent years. The Dhobi is a collective co-operative run by the laundry workers.
If you look in the background to the left you can see a half-completed high-rise with orange stuff around the top. That is Donald Trump's latest monstrosity, which is set to become the tallest residential building in the world when it tops out in 2016. Appalling, and an absolute architectural (not to mention infrastructure) mismatch for the part of the city it's in.
This green, incidentally, is very unusual: it's nearly always just white linens. This may have to do with wedding season starting up.
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