Yesterday was an interesting day. We spent the morning at the High Court admiring the building and listening in on a few cases. We wanted to fly the flag for the aphorism  “Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done” (Lord Hewart CJ, 1924 apparently) so we went to court to see it “being done”!

Although we could certainly “see” justice being done we couldn’t actually hear much of it. The courts were incredibly busy, people going in and out all the time, lots of standing up, huddling and sitting down again and to make matters worse the judges and barristers generally spoke too quietly for us to hear. Shame really because some of the judges comments we did catch were quite memorable. “Look, I’ve ruled, you’ve lost, learn from it”, “You come here ill prepared, you fail to make your point and you attempt to make another point instead. This is not the first time I have seen you act this way in this court. Case dismissed!”, “This is not advocacy, this is not nice, I will not continue this discussion.” Almost made me wish I was a Judge!

In the afternoon Leishia went for a sleep (something to do with those G and T’s perhaps?) so I went for a three hour walk around the back streets of the city. Luckily it was a sunny day so I mostly knew which way to go. These are some of the sights I saw along the way…

(click on a picture to blow it up)

  ornate facade

  more people than windows

 fantastic old building lucky it was dry!  more meat! the local kite shop  and more meat! mostly bananas  great carts  the local car breakers  could you fix this Kev?  the girl is washing pans, the guy laundry  look at that trolley, fantastic! I’ve got a bike just like this!

 smiley little lad 🙂

The last picture above is another of the pigeon feeding stations. Apparently they are  “Kabutar Khana” which translates as “Pigeon shelf”, the belief is that pigeons are unable to take care of themselves without human intervention and so to feed them creates good karma. I might spoil my own karma now but it seems to me these Indian pigeons must be a lot less self-reliant than hardy European pigeons!

The building in the background of the picture is the local maternity home!

Well that was Tuesday. Today (Wednesday) we are leaving Mumbai on the night sleeper and heading to South Goa for nine days where I suspect we will do very little to blog about, at most I foresee a story about me running along the beach or Leishia lying on it.

So this could be the start of ten days radio silence!