What could have been a Babymoon | Part 2

To read Part 1 of this post, click here.

Day 3

We’d been in Udaipur for over two days now and all we had done was move hotels and go out for dinner once. That morning, my husband urged me to wake up early since the hotel served an extensive breakfast and it would be a waste to miss that. But the thing was, even though the breakfast started around 7:00 my husband woke me up around 6:30 AM because if we went early everything would be fresh and hot.

What he didn’t realise was that I was on the verge of hating him for waking me up early – or rather waking me up at all – because the minute my eyes opened I would have to rush the bathroom and his timing was so great that he would wake me up (on purpose or accidentally) while he was in the bathroom.

I had to remind him that if he intended to do that then he must ensure that the bathroom is available for me to use especially since the hotel didn’t have another one like our house did. So unless he wanted me to puke on the floor, or barge in on him while he did his business, he should keep that in mind.

I was also in the phase where I wanted to sleep all day because I physically didn’t have the energy or the motivation to get off bed, and when I knew that breakfast was served till 10:30 AM there was no reason for me to be up at ~~7:00~~ 6:30. So that morning after my brief yet necessary trip to the bathroom, I went back to sleep and woke up around 9:00 to go have breakfast.

It was then that I discovered that the metallic taste in my mouth (that I originally thought was because of the antibiotics I was taking for my cough) was in fact a symptom of my pregnancy. The worst part was that things were fine while I was eating food. As in, while it was still in my mouth, the food didn’t taste different; I wasn’t averse to any kind of food yet, but the minute I swallowed and my mouth was empty, there was this horrible taste that made me averse to food in general. Drinking water to clear my mouth only made it worse because it felt like I was drinking oil. I haven’t actually had oil directly, but it did feel like that’s how it would taste.

Imagine being hungry every few hours and then feeling horrible after you’ve eaten something, like you’d be better off if you were hungry. It wasn’t good.

What made it even more worse was that my cough kind of stopped while food was in my mouth, but the minute I swallowed, much like the metallic taste, my cough erupted out of nowhere and the food that I would otherwise have managed to keep inside, started making its way back up. Fortunately, after the first night at the Villa, I didn’t throw up any food throughout the trip because I paid attention to the burps and stopped when my body told me I’d had enough, but the fear that it might happen was 90% of the reason that prevented me from enjoying myself whether it was about what I ate, what I did, or how I felt.

That day we decided to step out, finally, because it was also our anniversary. We had to do something. Luckily, Udaipur was more about seeing than doing. For the first time in three days, I dressed up; I put on kohl and some lipstick. That’s two things more than I’d otherwise done.

So after breakfast, we went to City Palace – a Palace that has been converted to a museum. It is on the bank of Lake Pichola. We went there after giving my breakfast enough time to digest so any motion sickness wouldn’t bother me.

Lake Pichola

The palace/museum was gorgeous. With artefacts from war times to royal furnishings and the colours, it was a delight to look at and learn, thanks to the boards with all the stories on them. We had to pay a fee to be allowed to click pictures and we realised that if we were more focussed on picture-taking, we would spend more time looking at everything through the lens than what was right in front of us. And let’s face it; once we’re back from a holiday, we are more interested in looking at pictures that have us in them than random pictures on walls. So we ditched that idea and didn’t look at our phones at all.

City Palace.

While we were inside, my cousin sister (who is like a sibling to me) called me to wish us. She knew we were going to start trying this year and since it was mid-February, she wanted to know if it had happened yet. It was too early to tell everyone in the family by then but then she is more like a best friend than a family member it was hard for me to hide things from her, especially when I knew that she was as excited about being an aunt as I was about having a baby.

So I decided to give a hint without actually telling her. When she asked me how things were inside my body – yeah, she’s not very subtle either – instead of directly asking me if I was pregnant, she asked me how it was inside my body, and I gave her the right answer. I told her it was not good.

She could take it either way. She could assume that I was saying that because nothing had happened yet or that it had happened and I wasn’t feeling that great. But I think she got what I meant. When she’d learned I’d been ill for the past few weeks, she guessed that I could be using that as a cover to hide my pregnancy, when in fact the reality was that it was in addition to my pregnancy.

It was a two hour long tour and by the end of it I was exhausted and thirsty and hungry. We stopped at a cafe right outside the palace building but inside the premises. When we saw the menu and checked the prices, we realised that it catered more to the foreign tourists, almost as if they had literally converted dollar prices in to INR – everything was three times the usual price. So we just had lemonade to quench my thirst and decided to go somewhere else for lunch.

We called a cab asked the driver to suggest a good place for food and he suggested this restaurant Jhumar that overlooked Fateh Sagar Lake.

Fateh Sagar Lake as seen from the restaurant.

Again, most of the patrons there were foreigners but the food wasn’t that great. We ate because I had to eat something and once we finished our food, we waited a while before calling a cab again to help the food settle down before it decided to come back up, if at all. Why take a chance?

Fateh Sagar Lake

Once we went back to the room we watched some TV and I slept for a good three hours at least. When I woke up around 6, I was hungry again so we stepped out to eat something. That night we ordered food in the room because I was terribly tired to step out again. But mostly it was because I was in my comfy clothes and I didn’t want to change again just to step out. I would rather that food be brought to me so that I could eat and go back to sleep.

Happy anniversary to us!

Back in the hotel room.

Oh, and that day, Star World started airing Game of Thrones all the way from season 1. Since I’d already slept for quite a bit in the evening, I wasn’t feeling particularly sleepy at 10 PM. So I thought I’d watch it. I was more curious about how they were going to censor the explicit scenes and dialogues. But what I realised when I watched the show with subtitles was that I learned so much new information that I could see the story in a totally new light. I was missing out so much without the subtitles that what I had understood of the story was barely anything at all.

I decided that I would watch episode 2 the following night. 🙂

DAY 4

On this day too, our last day in Udaipur, the routine was pretty much the same. The only change was that my husband waited until it was a decent time to wake me up (read: 9:30 AM) for breakfast. We came back to the room watched some TV and on this day we decided that we’d first have lunch and then step out in the evening because if we had to roam around during the day it would be better if it was early evening rather than the middle of the afternoon.

As my husband was tired of staying indoors, we stepped out for a late lunch around 2:30ish. After lunch we went to Saheliyon-ki-Bari (Garden of the maidens) – a vast garden with many beautiful flowers built by a King for his Princess and her friends.

Us, at Saheliyon-ki-Bari

But the many, many flowers meant that I had many, many opportunities to click photographs- something I did not shy away from. 🙂

It was a good change from the palace and our hotel room but once again, there was so much walking to do that I got tired pretty fast.

I know I don’t look tired, but I was.

We then went to a coffee shop where I had a hot chocolate and my husband, a cooler.

We spent the rest of the evening at the hotel and I have no memory of what we did for dinner. I am sure we ate something somewhere; I’m just clueless as to where it could have been. It’ll come to me, surely, but I’m not wasting any more time thinking about that.

We slept early because we had an early flight to catch in the morning, but I did catch episode 2 of Game of Thrones.

And so before we knew it, the trip came to an end. The cab journey to the airport and the flight back home were uneventful, thankfully. I didn’t have lozenges to suck on but I managed.

Once we landed in Mumbai, I was hungry again, obviously. We were going to have lunch at my mom’s but that was going to be at least another two hours. So I had a Faaso’s wrap at the airport. I wasn’t able to enjoy food much during those days, so I only ate for survival, but it made me feel full and therefore, not cranky.

As soon as we opened the door to our house, I was welcomed by this unusual smell. A day or two later when my sister came over she said my house always smelled that way and it didn’t bother her, but then at that moment when we just entered, it came on a bit too strong. When I entered the bathroom to freshen up, I threw up. I had been vomit free for three days in a foreign territory, but the minute I came back home, something had bothered me.

A few weeks later I realised that my house is full for lavender fragrances – the bathroom freshener, the aroma oil I use in the diffuser (that I had last lit in December, but I could smell it in February because, well, hormones.) When it dawned on me, I threw the bathroom fresheners away and locked up the diffuser and its oils in a shelf so the smell wouldn’t reach me.

As to why I didn’t feel that in the hotel room, well, it was clean and odour/fragrance free. I never thought I’d say this, but during that phase, frankly, I would’ve taken odour over fragrance any day. Or maybe not, but it certainly felt like it.

But before that realisation happened, I decided to go stay over at my mom’s for a few days because I needed to be fed every few hours and a) I didn’t have the energy to cook/make something so often, and b) I couldn’t stand any smells in the kitchen.

So there it was, a holiday that was planned so well in advance that we didn’t realise that a pregnancy could happen before that. If I were in my second trimester when we travelled, it could have been a babymoon.

But we didn’t.

And it wasn’t.

Meh.

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