The Terrific3 travel blog

We had a pretty long day yesterday and got back late so this post is happening the next morning :-). I appreciate my readers and you checking in on me after lack of a post!

Yesterday morning we left our hotel at 930am (apparently things open late here) for the day’s activities. Our driver picked us up and drove us to the city palace and we picked up our local tour guide, Girish, or Gigi, en route.

The Udaipur city palace is the second largest palace in all of India, built over the course of some 300 years by 22 kings of Udaipur who each added on, so you can see the art and architecture of each era. It is very grand and very beautiful and very large and right by Pichola lake, which is also gorgeous. We spent about 2 hours touring the palace, learning the history, and touring the museums. It was a fairly busy place—our tour guide said on weekends, udaipur was frequented by Gujarati tourists as Gujarat is so close.

After the tour, the boys got their requisite ice cream

Our guide then took us to a delicious lunch place that overlooked a lake. The Malai kofta, which he recommended, was quite good. My experience so far has been that guides usually take us to lunch and then leave us alone until we are done. This guide hovered a bit more, I noticed.

Ok so that brings me to the guide. I have become most honest since I arrived in India. Let me explain. As modern as India is (and this also happens in the US), everyone always assumes I’m heterosexual and married and somehow traveling alone with my kids. Our first guide in Agra assumed it and said something like, “and your husband is back in the US..” and I didn’t correct him. I did finally tell our driver that I didn’t have a husband. Generally, I feel a little uncomfortable revealing my true self here, as I grew up with a family from whom I had to also hide my true identity for fear of shaming, retaliation etc. My parents didn’t know about my first boyfriend of 7 years until the 7th year. So some of that is still part of me when I travel, plus I’m under the impression that I’m “safer” if people think I’m married. But I kinda got tired of pretending or just not correcting assumptions so when my tour guide yesterday mentioned me being brave traveling alone with 2 kids and leaving their father at home, I just told him they have no father. Then I got the “I am sorry.” So then I said, “no, I had them on my own. There is no father.” He then told me he salutes me and wanted to shake my hand and said he was impressed and that he also understood traveling across the world with 2 kids was very challenging. Yes it is, that is for sure! For example, S has interrupted me about 40 times so far writing this post. There is no personal space for any of us, lots of packing and unpacking and taking everyone’s needs into account intersecting with the tour, and having a neurodivergent kiddo makes each transition and each day between somewhat and extremely challenging as we are managing lots of mood swings.

So it felt great to just reveal my true self. The tour guide told me he somewhat understood as he separated from his ex wife when his daughter was young (now she’s grown). However, revealing this about myself I guess opened the door for a little more flirting from his side and over the course of the day, he flirted more and more, telling me cheesy lines about how beautiful I was in my dress I had made in India, something about how my eyes were doing the talking, etc. He invited me out a couple times to see Udaipur in the evening (after kids went to bed) or to go dancing, but I was like, dude, I don’t have a babysitter…are you clueless? I’m traveling alone with 2 kids. I’ll have to say I was pretty flattered by this very unexpected attention. Before he started flirting, he got my WhatsApp number so he even sent me a message checking in that I made it to the hotel safe last night (not the usual guide behavior). Again, I’m flattered, and he’s attractive and interesting (spends summers in Sardinia in Italy where he works with a textile company), speaks fluent Italian, is part of an NGO that helps Indians with hemophilia (though maybe he told me these things to try to impress me), however I’m not opening the doors to a cross-world romance. I’m way too practical. And not really opening the doors to romance while I travel here either; after all, the attention I have is for my kids. So I’ve remained relatively silent, just thanking him for his compliments though I think he has picked up an undercurrent vice from me of relative interest.

Back to touring…. We went to a silver store next (udaipur mines lots of Silver and I love silver rings) and I bought myself a ring and Z a birthday present of a silver bracelet. Then we went to the Maharani (princess) gardens which the kings had built for their queens. It was so breezy and beautiful.

Z was especially tired yesterday as he woke at 4am and we had a full afternoon and then evening of activities planned but he kept begging for some down time at the hotel. So our tour guide moved some stuff around so we could have the down time as me and S really wanted to see the Rajasthani dance performance in the evening.

So we went over to our hotel for 2 hours to rest and then got ready to go back out for this dance performance that was 6-7pm. Now my kids go to bed at 7, so I didn’t know how it would go, but they loved it, especially zian! Lots of traditional Rajasthani dance and music and the last performance was the best—a woman dancing on broken glass with 7 water pots on her head.

Our guide sat next to me during this performance and I could totally feel the flirty vibe. I tried to put my kids in between us but they ended up moving higher to get a better stage view, so there you have it.

This morning, we are being picked up again at 930am and will be driving out of town to see some famous temples and then later will do a lake pichola boat cruise, all with the same guide. Hoping to have down time today as we need to leave at 530an tomorrow for our flight to Mumbai, which is the last leg of our journey before heading home.

I can’t believe the voyage is almost over!

I leave you with a photo of me and the kids with Jagdish, our driver, en route to the dance performance last night.