this is small town music, this is big town music.

(chapati making)
(oh the people you meet at train stations)

So here's a dosage of culture for you.
These are all from a Friday in November, when I was on my way to Mumbai/Bombay for Exeat (a long weekend away, we get two a term).

Deciding at the spur of the moment to go to Bombay, we went to the train station. There, we bought our tickets, discovered we had three hours to kill, and wandered around the area trying local food. We walked into a small, one-meal restaurant filled with Indian men eating thalis (not sure how to spell that. It is a round metal tray on which one gets chapati/rice/some sort of starch and several bowls of dip-like things. I suppose it is the Indian version of tapas, and the contents differs per place and region.) and tried that. It was really nice, although us being there may have bowled them over a bit (being 'white'). We also saw men making chapatis around th back of a hotel, which was interesting. Two point five hours and stomachs filled with chai, Indian sweets and thalis, we went back to the station.

The platform was covered in sleeping people, either waiting for trains or simply sleeping there as it was covered. We met a man dressed in white with some sort of massive horn instrument on his back. He looked holy in a way, so we decided to practice our limited Hindi on him. Unfortunately, he spoke almost no Hindi himself, as he spoke Marathi, but we managed to chat to some extent about where he was from, where he was going and got him to play the horn thing for us. This gathered a crowd, and we decided it was about time to move on and find our train.
Once on, we spotted two other religious looking men, dressed all in orange. We tried to take pictures of them discreetly, but I'm not sure how well that worked. After all that, we fell asleep clutching on to our belongings, and woke up in Bombay five hours later.