India - Day 2

We awoke to the hum of Mumbai's Tuesday morning traffic.  The occasional beeping of car horns was only broken by another plane taking off at the airport nearby.  But thick hotel windows did their job of dulling the noise out almost completely.  As we look out, the haze of the city casts a characteristic orange hue that you always imagine India to have.

Okay - not the most breath taking view - but great if you're a plane spotter!

On arrival at the hotel the night before, we had quickly checked our emails etc, specifically looking for a response to our query as to when SI would need us to be at their offices.  To our surprise, they wanted us there today - the 5th of June - to do blood tests.  So, after completely overindulging at breakfast, we returned to the room where the phone rang with an SI representative on the end of the line.  A car had been sent and would be arriving in the next 45 minutes to take us to the offices of SI.  As expected, the taxi arrived and before we knew it we were a million cars deep in a traffic jam.  That said, we somehow moved with beat of the Mumbai traffic drum, our driver weaving an beeping before arriving at SI's offices in Bhandup West; surprisingly quickly - well by Mumbai standards anyway.  We were slightly underwhelmed when we arrived, but had to remind ourselves that we were in India and not some expensive medical office in an elite area of an Australian capital city.  The staff were incredibly gracious and welcoming and over the next 15 minutes we met all the staff who had been involved in different aspects of our journey to date.  The guy from accounts, Dr Ajja's Executive Assistant, the Senior Admin Manager.  But down to business.  It was time to collect blood.

GB having his blood taken

Within moments it was all done and then the nurse turned to me and said "You're next".  It turned out that both partners need to be tested - an interesting but insignificant oversight.  A few months earlier when I had blood taken before, I nearly passed out at the clinic.  This time, the queasiness returned, but went fairly quickly.  Shortly thereafter, we met with Dr Yash, who welcomed us too and asked if we had any questions.  Before we knew it we were back on the road again bounding toward our hotel - but not before a tour of the entire SI offices.

On returning to the hotel, a delightful bunch of flowers had been left for us - compliments of SI.

SI had now advised that tomorrow would be the day to make our first deposit into the baby bank and the second deposit was likely to occur sometime between Saturday and Monday depending on when the Egg Donor's egg transfer is due to take place.

The afternoon was spent at the very exclusive, but largely disappointing shopping mall called the Oberoi in the North-Western suburbs of Mumbai.  After a few hours of browsing the shops and having lunch we headed back to the hotel for a bit of a nanna-nap and some Mumbai research.

We know we have 2 definitely clear days when the ED won't be cycling in Mumbai between now and when we are due to leave next week and therefore have gone about looking into a tour of the slums as well as hiring a cab for the day to check out the Gateway of India and a number of other local attractions.  But for the time being, we're off to the clinic tomorrow to do what boys need to do to get this baby caper underway.  You may or may not be pleased to know that pictures from this part of the journey won't feature on the blog....!!

Stay tuned.