Cindy Bajema moved from California to Bangalore a year ago and blogs at snidknits.blogspot.com on everything from monsoon leaks and “impromptu vegetable stalls” to how she discovered—the hard way—that RAC on a railway ticket meant ‘reserved against cancellation’, not ‘reserved air conditioned’. “Even if it is just a ‘this is what I did today’, it helps you envision what life is like there as an outsider and makes a change of environment less daunting,” she says. A photographer for a local magazine for expats, she loves exploring the shopping galleries at Chickpet, the streetside fare at Malleswaram and Woody’s restaurant on Commercial Street, where she is slowly working her way through the dosas in the menu.

India is taste bud Elysium and here, food is the ultimate cultural catalyst. Says Jurate Petraityte, a Lithuanian married to a Mumbaikar, “Everyone keeps asking me if I have got used to Indian food by now and I joke that Indian food was the reason I married my husband.” Her blog, A Girl From Foreign (agirlfromforeign.blogspot.com) reads like a Mumbai eat-out guide, taking you through roadside sev puri and bhutta, Burmese stew and martinis at a Colaba restaurant and buffet lunches at Marine Drive. Language is a bigger problem than she anticipated. Despite taking Hindi lessons, Jurate, who moved to Mumbai a year ago, finds it difficult to follow the Bambaiya dialect. But it hasn’t interrupted her intrepid exploration of Mumbai by car, auto and yes, the local train. In one post, she recommends taking the new pedestrian bridge connecting Bandra Kurla Complex and Bandra station — “No need to take an auto and get stuck on narrow roads crowded with people and hawker stalls at Bandra market,” she writes.

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