My First Time in India: Goa's Colonial Charm and Mumbai's Sensory Explosion

Before I ever set foot in India, the country lived in my imagination in two very specific ways.

The first was the pageant stage. Growing up in the Philippines, I watched Indian women captivate the world — their poise, intelligence, and an elegance that felt genuinely rooted in something ancient and proud. They carried their culture with them like a crown.

The second memory is quieter. In the 1990s, my family hosted a missionary nun from India. I don’t remember every detail, but I remember her kindness — the kind that isn’t performed, that just radiates from a person who has genuinely given her life to something larger than herself. She talked about the challenges of life back home with such honesty, and about her faith with such steadiness, that India became something sacred in my mind long before I ever booked a flight.

In 2015, I finally went.

The route was Manila to Kuala Lumpur, then a connecting flight to Goa — the same westward arc that so many Southeast Asian travelers take into the subcontinent. I didn’t know what to expect. I thought I did. I was wrong.

What Is Goa Really Like?

Goa is not what most people picture when they think of India.

Before I landed, I braced myself for the intensity I’d heard about — the crowds, the heat, the relentless motion of an Indian city. What I found instead was something unexpectedly gentle. Goa moves at its own pace, and that pace is slow by any standard. The air smells of salt and spice and something floral I still couldn’t name. The streets, compared to what I’d encounter later in Mumbai, feel almost dreamily unhurried.

What stopped me in my tracks within the first hour was the architecture. I was not prepared for how deeply the Portuguese had marked this place. The churches here are not modest. They are grand, whitewashed, centuries-old, standing in the afternoon sun with the quiet authority of buildings that have outlasted every political argument about who they belong to. Many Goans carry names that sound Spanish to a Filipino ear — Rodrigues, Fernandes, D’Souza — and suddenly the centuries of colonial history collapse into something tangible and personal. The Philippines and Goa have more in common than a casual glance would suggest. We were both shaped by the Iberian world, both left with its cathedrals and its contradictions.

What Makes Goa Different from the Rest of India?

The thing I kept coming back to was how natural everything felt — including the cows.

I had read about India’s sacred cows, of course. But reading about them and then watching one amble calmly through a busy intersection, entirely unbothered, entirely at home, while motorcycles and tuk-tuks adjust their routes around it — that is something else. It isn’t chaos. It’s a negotiation, and everyone in Goa has been having that negotiation their whole lives. The cow has right of way. That’s simply how it is, and the city bends around it with a kind of practiced grace.

The food in Goa was a revelation. I love to eat — that’s not a casual statement, it’s a defining characteristic — and Goan cuisine does something to your palate that I can only describe as an awakening. The coconut base, the vinegar tang from the Portuguese influence, the slow heat of the spices: every meal felt like a conversation between two culinary cultures that had been talking for five hundred years and had arrived at something genuinely new. The fish curry rice I ate at a small restaurant near the beach is still one of the best meals of my life.

The beaches draw Europeans and Russians in enormous numbers, and there’s a reason for that. They are beautiful. Long, unhurried stretches of coast where you can spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing and feel completely justified. But what I loved most about Goa was the feeling in the quieter corners — the old quarters, the countryside between towns — where history and daily life sit side by side without making a fuss about it.

What Was Mumbai Like as a First-Time Visitor?

Then I flew to Mumbai, and Goa became a dream I’d half-forgotten.

The contrast was immediate and total. Mumbai is vast in a way that has to be experienced to be understood. It is not just large — it is dense, layered, humming at a frequency that is distinctly its own. From the moment you step outside the airport, the city is in full motion around you, and you either find your rhythm or you get swept along anyway.

Is Mumbai Good for Food Lovers?

For someone who eats the way I eat, Mumbai was paradise.

I had heard that Indian food was extraordinary, but I wasn’t fully prepared for the vegan dimension of it. Mumbai offers an almost embarrassing abundance of plant-based food — not as a trend, not as a lifestyle category, but as the natural state of a culinary tradition that has been building depth and complexity for thousands of years without needing meat to do it. You can eat magnificently in Mumbai for very little money, and every meal comes with a spice profile that makes you rethink what flavor actually means.

The vegetables here have a vividness — not just in color but in taste — that I found humbling as someone who grew up thinking I knew what vegetables were. Lentil dishes, flatbreads, chutneys, street snacks that manage to be simultaneously sour and sweet and hot and cooling within a single bite: Mumbai fed me in ways I wasn’t expecting to be fed.

But the moment that genuinely changed something in me was the spice market.

I thought I knew what a spice market was. I come from the Philippines, where markets are alive and generous and full of color. But the sheer scale and variety of what was on offer in Mumbai was mind-boggling in the most literal sense — it bent my mind slightly out of shape and I’ve never quite recovered. Towers of turmeric, walls of dried chillies in forty different varieties, piles of cardamom and cumin and things I had no name for, vendors who could talk for an hour about the difference between two types of the same spice and make every word interesting. I stood in the middle of it feeling very small and very fortunate.

What Should You Know Before Visiting India?

India asks something of you before it gives you everything back.

It asks you to slow down in Goa, to release the need to control the pace and just let the afternoon happen. It asks you to speed up in Mumbai, to match its energy rather than fight it. It asks you to eat with curiosity rather than caution, to trust the spice and the process, to let the food tell you where you are.

I came to India carrying two images — a pageant crown and a nun’s steady kindness — and I left with something far richer and more complicated. A country that is ancient and modern, chaotic and deeply serene, full of contrasts that somehow coexist without cancelling each other out.

Goa will slow your pulse and rearrange your sense of time. Mumbai will accelerate everything and show you what a city looks like when it’s operating at full capacity. Together, they gave me a portrait of India that I know only scratches the surface — and made me certain I’ll go back to scratch further.