Christmas in Thailand

This year Christmas fell perfectly - a four day weekend! Given this stroke of luck, we decided to take a trip to southeast Asia. It would allow us to stay in time zone so I could work between Christmas and New Year's (CEB's busiest time), but we could take advantage of the extra days off with a bit of a trip. We took off for Bangkok on Christmas Eve after work. Lucky me, the middle seat. But for real good luck, Mama Mia was playing. I had been wanting to see that movie for ages, but Sean would never see it. Now I know why - it was absolutely horrible! Sean was very satisfied with his choice - the Batman series. The Bangkok airport is sooo big. It felt like we walked several miles before finding the way out. Mental note - arrive early for the flight out or we'll never make it. The taxi ride to the hotel was exhilarating. Never did the driver drop below 110 and rarely did he spend more than a few seconds in any one lane. We soon learned that was normal in Thailand.



Thursday, Bangkok Day One - Merry Christmas! Is it really Christmas though? There are no lights, trees, santas, really anything that would lead you to believe it was Christmas. We woke early to get a good brekky and find our way across town to a Catholic church (thanks Catholictraveler.com) close to the sites. The church was beautiful - the mass, a little long - and there were more people filling the pews in a non-Christian country than you would think. We were not the only westerners there, that's for sure and to top it off the priest opened the service with a G'day. An Aussie!



After church we took off on foot to make our way to Banglamphu. Along the way, we were going to catch a glimpse of our first Buddha - the golden buddha. This attraction was not in our guide book but made on the hotel's tourist map. It was also in the direction of our walk so it seemed like a no brainer. This ended up being a very bad decision. Sean had no idea where we were going, although he refused to say so. Who uses a cartoon map as their only means of direction?! We finally found the water taxi and set off for a day full of Buddhas (one reclining, one emerald, one golden, on standing, one sitting - you get the point) and Phos.









On Friday we started with the Teak Mansion. Sorry, they don't allow pictures of the mansion as members of the royal family still live there. It was beautiful though. A colonial house that looked completely out of place among the Buddhas. Same with the Parliament building.





As we were walking out of the Parliament building, we were approached by a tuk-tuk driver. He said that it was too far to walk and that he would take us to see all of the sites we had mapped out for just 40 baht (a couple of dollars). Here is a lesson to all - if it sounds too good to be true, IT IS! Always the optimist (or naive), I said, let's do it! All is well, he took us to see a temple that wasn't even on the map. Very cool and no one was there. Then, the next stop was what? A shop? He took us to three other shops to browse and buy Thailand goods - made-to-specification suits, jewelry, and other hand crafted goods. The deal -that he later shared after we spent only 4 minutes in a jewelry shop - was that he receives a government petrol voucher for taking tourists to these spots. The rub - we didn't want to go there and had no intention of buying anything. After leaving the first two after only 5 minutes, he told us we needed to stay inside for 10 min in order to get the voucher. The voucher was worth way more than our fare for the day so we helped him out.







*Note - right after we left. Protesters over took the airport and their are still riots going on in Thailand.