Bandra

I was shocked in my first year of college, around 2000, when I heard that my friend Sameer, being a Maharashtrian and living in Bombay all his life had never seen the Gateway of India. It was just unimaginable. It took Nicholas and me almost a week before we came to terms with the fact that such a thing was actually possible. It was with us, I think, that Sameer made his maiden voyage to the Gateway :)

Fast-forward 10 years to 2010. I have lived in Bombay for many years and I have never been to Bandra. And apparently that is where everything cool happens :P. Anyways this trip came about due to a number of factors. The first reason was that my ophthalmologist friend suggested that I pay a visit to the Mount Mary church. The second reason was that I needed to exchange a book with a friend that we had been planning for almost a month. The books are a topic by themselves, which I'll discuss on another day. For starters just google Dr. Brian Weiss. The third reason was that I had not been to any place interesting in quite sometime and I needed to do some photography. So all these reasons made me push myself out of the house and head for Bandra. Loved the trip to Bandra thanks to the NMMT air-conditioned bus.

It was cloudy throughout which made the weather bearable. I was a little worried about the church timings but was really glad to find out that it was open when I reached.

I have always loved the architecture of old churches. Was decently impressed with this too. Though, the churches at Goa are just plain awesome. The interiors were interesting too with Christ's story illustrated all around the walls.

I sat there for a while and generally tried to gather my thoughts. I observed that a lot of people were present  (I guess it was because of the fact that it was a Sunday). I also realized that people from all faith came there to pray. The fact that a lot of them were leaving there shoes outside the church made it very clear. It was funny to see a guard telling people to wear their shoes inside rather than leaving them out. Obviously most people would find the idea of wearing their shoes inside a holy place sacrilegious and so they left them out.

Observed the people, prayed a bit, clicked some photos and waited for my friend to come. I was pretty satisfied with my trip so far.

I first came in contact with this friend of mine during my kitten incident (Refer to my old posts) and since then we have only met online and this would be the first time we would be actually meeting. She had promised to show me around Bandra and so thats what we did when we met. We first went to the Bandra Fort which was the saddest fort I have ever seen in my life. I don't know if I missed something there but from what I saw I am sure Belapur Fort is bigger than that :P

Though I did manage to take a couple of photos there. I wanted her to pose in front of the Taj Lands and take an excited touristy look wala photo, to which she said she would rather die than do that :) She in fact suggested that I do it. Now I think I should have done it. Hmmm... next time maybe :)

Took a couple of photos showing the very famous Bandra-Worli sea link. The crowd made it really sad. There were people all over (mostly couples :P). And I actually was startled finding people at weirdest locations :D

Walked along band-stand for a while and had some sort of a light-very-late lunch. I had a really good time there and we ended up talking about a lot of stuff. Now some seriously freaky thing happened at the end of it. In one of my previous posts, I had mentioned about how I keep seeing 11:11 in a lot of places numerous times in a day. The number patterns have started increasing now.

We were about to leave when she suddenly tells me that for sometime now she has been seeing number patterns over and over again in various places. I was very amused and asked her about the 11:11. Apparently she keeps seeing 444 apart from 1111. It was good to finally meet someone who saw similar number patterns :) We exchanged some more stories about where all we see the numbers and then before we left she asked me what time it was. Guess what the time was? It was 4:44... :)