Sultan Qaboos and Sweaty Doha

In my last post I forgot to tell the story of the first person outside immediate family to know I was pregnant. It’s an instructive story in that it reminds ladies in early pregnancy to eat breakfast. Having been lazing around in bed until mid-morning one weekend while Mr A went to the dentist, I went to let the cats out and found one of their eyes was all cloudy. Slightly panicking, I quickly pulled on some clothes over my pajamas, put the cat in its box and drove straight to the vet, who took Nimr out and started poking away at his eye while muttering something about a third eyelid.  It was at this point that I started to feel a little peculiar so excused myself and went to sit outside on the steps of the building – my brain was thinking ‘I need fresh air’.  What I actually got was some warm, humid air and a very dirty backside, none of which made me any less likely to faint. The receptionist said I could use the loo inside but unfortunately I couldn’t make it and was forced to sit down, as if in protest, on the corridor floor, in order to regain my composure. Clearly an experienced lady, she guessed I was pregnant and rather bizarrely became the first person to know the happy news.  She then kindly waited outside the bathroom in case I knocked myself out on the sink and gave me a banana.

The vet had by this point done all she could for the cat, so I sat in the waiting area eating Mrs Receptionist’s banana, stroking the cat, feeling a little self-conscious about baring my shoulders in a vest surrounded by abaya-clad Qatari girls (my jumper really wasn’t an option) and getting covered in cat hair.  I eventually got hold of Mr A who had to abandon the dentist’s chair with his teeth half-cleaned to pick us up. As a punishment for not being there in my hour of need, Mrs Receptionist gave him evil looks for having obviously left his wife and in utero child to deal with the cat while he played golf (or something like that). Needless to say, we all recovered. I am now a big breakfast person. The cat can see again, so he’s happy.

Last weekend we spent 48 hours last weekend in Muscat, Oman for a friend’s 30^th birthday, staying at the same beautiful posh hotel I bored everyone with last year .  It’s still beautiful.

This time we actually made it to the Grand Mosque which was built by Sultan Qaboos, the ruler of Oman, about six years ago.  It’s huge, with separate ladies’ (timber mashrabiya screens, carved stone walls, beautiful) and men’s prayer halls (huge with the largest diamond chandelier I have ever seen and a lot of colourful tiles and carpet patterns).  This marked our first visit inside a Gulfi Mosque, and total failure of documentation since our camera had run out of battery and I’d forgotten to pack the charger.  It turns out we have cameras on our phones, so we have a selection of slightly blurry, oddly-coloured photos.  I fashioned myself a really rather genuine hijab as required by the mosque officials, which didn’t help with extreme heat but did help to soak up sweat. All the Omanis we have met are incredibly friendly and relaxed people, apart from the scary man at the mosque who threw out a German tourist for being in shorts. He then marched off muttering about how “someone will have to bear responsibility for this outrage!”

Otherwise we lay in the pools at the hotel.  A lot.  We had a special GCC residents discount rate and we realised that this is probably because anyone who lived outside the Gulf wouldn’t go outside in late July unless they were bonkers.  A room upgrade with free mini bar (ah, the shame of not being able to take full advantage), free cocktails at sunset and free room service breakfast meant we just about coped, and sucked in all the memories as we realised that such jaunts are unlikely to happen once the babe makes an appearance. I collected shells on the beach and got chatting to an Omani guy who was a little more into the conversation than I was. Upon parting ways, he gave me possibly the most rubbish shell I’d seen on the whole beach.

So now we’re back in sweaty Doha, working our way through Season 4 of The Wire. Mr A’s been doing live radio interviews in Arabic – I think I find it more stressful to listen to this than he does to do them. I hear the cricket starts again today so that means he won’t be leaving the flat this weekend. Great news.  I’ll spend the days trying to squeeze my wedding ring on to my swollen fingers (pregnancy is non stop glamour).  Unlikely, but at least it’s something to distract me from worrying about Flintoff’s knee.  Or we’ll spend the weekend watching Edgbaston in the rain, which to us will be a surprisingly fun.  Believe it or not, I’m actually missing rain.

Scans and Smoke

What this blog has been skilfully avoiding for the past months is that I’m five months pregnant.  This meant that whilst we were bashing dunes and getting dehydrated back in April, I was feeling a little fragile.  And upon our return from a trip to London, the combination of an overnight flight, tiredness and morning sickness meant I vomited at the side of the road at 7am directly in front of a line of surprised workers waiting for their bus.  I haven’t done that since an ill-advised night of drinking some years ago, and then my only audience at 2am was a drunk Irishman who expressed his disgust.

Anyway, whilst I will try to avoid the blog becoming a detailed diary of developing stretchmarks, birthing techniques and swollen feet, there are a couple of things about being pregnant in Doha which may be different to being pregnant in the UK.  Perhaps not, since I haven’t incubated a child anywhere else, but maybe…

• I have been going to a private hospital for scans, check-ups and tests which is more like a hotel or office than a medical establishment.  You can’t have a scan without having a check-up, and you have to pay for both of those, and then the Doctor sends you for blood-tests that of course mean handing over a credit card first.  An afternoon there can set you back about £200, and that doesn’t include the refreshments between appointments at the stylish hospital café (peach smoothie while we wait for the scan results, anybody?). Nothing has made me appreciate the NHS more.

• It is officially illegal to engage in “intimate relations” with members of the opposite sex in Qatar, let alone have babies, out of wedlock.  So it is assumed that you are married when you go to antenatal appointments (though we’ve never yet actually had to produce our wedding certificate) and therefore when the nurse wants to know how long you’ve been trying for a baby, she asks ‘how long have you been married?’.  Which reminds me of being in Syria where every taxi driver would ask whether you were married, how long for, and how many children you have.  Trying to explain that you hadn’t quite got round to kids yet elicited a look full of pity since you had presumably been focussing on nothing else since your wedding night.

• No-one warns you in advance that you’re not meant to drink too much caffeine when you’re pregnant.  That means no more endless cups of tea which is, in my view, a tragedy especially since any child of mine will be brought up on the stuff.  On the upside, if you haven’t had any alcohol for months then Holsten non-alcoholic beer tastes like the real thing.

• As I was lying on a bed waiting for the nurse to spread gel on my stomach for our 12-week scan (the one where we found out if everything looked normal), the doctor started telling Mr A and I that sometimes when she does this scan there isn’t a heartbeat and then the woman comes in bleeding a couple of days later.  She is UK- and American-trained but perhaps missed some classes on sensitivity. It may be a Doha thing: a friend of ours here told us that at the same stage their doctor clapped his hands and announced jovially, “…and now we shall see if the baby is alive!”.

• At a later ultrasound scan, a hijab-ed Arab doctor who didn’t have great English told us the ‘tallness’ of our baby and giggled at the size of the bun’s willy.  At the end, she thanked us for the beautiful baby, gave us some test results including how much ‘liquor’ was swilling around in my abdomen (apparently just the right amount) and a CD with lots of totally unfathomable pictures.

• Pregnant women aren’t meant to change cat litter trays which is obviously leaving a huge void in my life.

• Mr A’s employer doesn’t recommend giving birth here so will pay for me to return to London for my ‘confinement’.  I’m wondering whether an elaborate gown is supplied for this 19^thCentury style practice?

• I didn’t tell anyone at work I was pregnant for the first 3 months (though really it’s only two months since you’re already one month pregnant when you find out, what a cheat).  In order to stall impending conversations about career plans, I had made up a story about not knowing when we might leave Qatar.  In the end no-one minded about this subterfuge.  In fact the senior Qataris were uncharacteristically excited by the prospect of a child, and at one point threatened to buy cake for the whole department in celebration (I was incredibly relieved when this never in fact materialised).  Qatari ladies quiz me in the toilet about my birthing plans, and reveal that they are 28 and already have four children.

• When we were in Damascus, we told the man looking after the decrepit old-town house that I was expecting and he began ululating, imitating how the baby would be greeted in the Arab world. He was very clear that the little one should be born in the UK so that it is ‘white’ rather than ‘brown’.

• Syrians say that you can crave sleep rather than food. That’s what my pregnancy is all about.

• A Philippina woman at work who I’d only met once before was talking to me when she stopped to ask ‘Is there…?  I mean, is it….? Are you….?  Is there someone in there?’ before stroking my stomach for longer than was strictly necessary.

• Last week I was at home when the fire alarm was going off intermittently.  I ignored it.  Then it started going off more insistently so I opened the door to our flat, smelt smoke, and headed out.  Grabbing keys and phone, I walked down 36 flights of stairs to the ground floor where there was predictable chaos with a few fire engines mixed in and lots of people with pet boxes which made me feel incredibly guilty for having abandoned the cats to impending smoke inhalation.  I walked around to the back of our building in order to be in the shade (midday, 40+ degrees, no sunglasses) and saw plumes of smoke coming out the second floor.  Luckily Mr A’s car was sitting in the car park so I sat in there with the air conditioning on full power, trying to ignore the aroma of his old Chicken Tikka sandwich which had been gentle warming for a while, awaiting his return.  Then we went straight to the hospital for a scan where the woman looked at me wearily when I explained that I didn’t have my appointment card because there was a fire in my building.  Apparently the men’s sauna went up in flames, which is probably divine retribution for anyone thinking they needed a sauna in Doha in the first place.  Our spare bedroom retains a faint whiff of barbecue.

• The American book I have about pregnancy began measuring progress in fruit and pulses.  A zygote the size of a pinto bean became a medium green olive, a large lime and then a peach.  Obviously they ran out of inspiration for large fruits at that point because disappointingly since then it’s been a fist and a softball. 
  

For now, the bump and I are expanding in the Doha heat and looking forward to returning to the UK for the NHS, long summer evenings and a larger selection of maternity trousers.  Meanwhile I made Mr A spend an evening reorganising all our books with me.  Apparently it’s called nesting.

Ms A