More Traveling While Pregnant

So this weekend my husband and I got a last minute, paid for, chance to jet off to Switzerland for a work conference.  It was awesome.  I will probably add more to this post later, but I just want to say that for the most part, because of my past traveling while pregnant experience, I had some ideas about what to expect.  The biggest change for us was prioritizing sleep for me.  Instead of trying to get to Geneva and the Alps in one day, which is a plane ride, then a train ride, then a bus ride, we flew in, stayed one night in Geneva, and then did the second half of our trip the next day, and then took a nice nap.  It worked like a charm, and I was able to enjoy the train and bus rides, which were just beautiful.  We also scheduled flights at sleep appropriate times, and decided against trying to fly in early morning, and returning late, which we often do to save money and take full advantage of time.  We also made our own travel plans, instead of relying on conference planners.  For the most part, we are very flexible and love to go with the flow and see what adventures we get into.  But we didn't do this for this trip- we planned our own trip and, while we stayed flexible, we only relied on ourselves.  This was a huge comfort to me.  Finally, I scheduled an afternoon nap every day.  This turned out to be vital because I was exhausted very easily. 
The thing I would have changed was that I wish I had brought more snacks so I wouldn't be on the conference planners exact meal plans, but the gift shops had treats so I never went hungry.  That said, I had to eat cookies for dinner one night when I couldn't stomach the food options, and I was pretty sick to my stomach as a result.  I had to fore go some of the spa treatments because I wasn't sure if they were okay with pregnancy, and the language barrier was enough to make me not want to risk a misunderstanding, but that was no big deal.  And the natural hot/warm springs were amazing, and so comfortable, and the trip was so romantic. 
Oh, but here are some things that I couldn't have anticipated and that made a difference.  I felt a lot less flexible on the food issue.  We spent our last day walking around Geneva, which is a cosmopolitan city that I have been to before (and I've been to jail there as well, but that is a different story).  There is nothing particularly foreign about it, but navigating it was infinitely tougher for me than I expected.  Our walk turned into a full fledged hunt for food, and the hungrier I got the more indecisive and paranoid I got about restaurant quality and dangerous ingredients- I had already accidentally ate half a vodka sorbet without realizing there was vodka in it and I didn't want to make the same mistake with cheese.  I felt overwhelmed by the language barriers, even though most people spoke English and, of course, most people we encountered were very nice.  I just didn't want to deal with it.  I started to not even want to approach people in French, even though I can make myself understood enough through rough French and hand signals, but it all started to feel very hard.  And finally, I couldn't walk as much as I wanted.  We were walking a pretty normal amount for visiting a European city, and I got tired much more quickly and got a cramp in my right side, the same cramp that has been bothering me for two weeks now.  When I got to the bathroom I noticed I had some staining, which was so slight that I'm not even sure it was blood, but I was just at the end of my rope and didn't want to move around anymore.  This, of course, was impossible, and we left to catch our plane early, but it was still hours before we were home.  All of this makes me wonder if going to China next month is a bad idea.  My friend says that people get sick and tired visiting China anyways, and I got sick visiting freakin' Geneva, how is China going to hit me?  I have a lot of thinking about it to do, and I'm frustrated that even though the trip was great, I had pretty real limitations that were hard for me to understand and express.