Christmas 2011 and New Year 2012!

 We had a busy Christmas and New Year, as did most people I imagine.  This year we had a quiet Christmas Eve drink at a friends house, she had lovingly organised a group of women to gather gifts for an orphanage near to her home and a few of the ladies and their children visited on Christmas Eve to sing carols and hand out presents to the children.  One of the husbands even dressed in a Santa suit for the afternoon which I thought was a lovely touch.  We didn't attend the gift giving party but we did pop over to the hostesses house later on for a mulled wine and some play time for the kids to wear them out so they would sleep while Santa visited in the night. Christmas day had us all awake by 6am and surprisingly Judd and Lillie held their excitement in check until after mummy and daddy woke up and we all had breakfast.  It was a nice Christmas morning spent opening and playing with all the new toys Santa had left then after lunch and a quick nap we headed to a friends house for a traditional Christmas early dinner.  All the children played all afternoon and well into the night, the mummies and daddies ate their fill and drank plenty of good wine and beer before heading home well after 10pm that night.  It was a different way to spend Christmas Day for us, usually it is spent quietly with a few family members and a couple of kids but this year to have so many children for Judd and Lillie to play with and go crazy with was a nice change and has made us think that maybe next year our family Christmas Day may need to include alot more kids and kid games and activities.  One of the highlights of the evening was when our host on the spur of the moment dressed up as Santa and ran outside the window where the kids where watching a movie and scared the wits out of them all.  They all went nuts screaming "Santa!  Santa!" and went running all over the house and yard trying to track him down.  Luckily he is a fast runner as he scooted away to hide then pop back out again to keep them searching and squealing.  It was even a good laugh for us adults.  

Boxing Day was meant to be spent at a Softball Game up at Horseshoe Point but we were so tired and worn out from the previous day we didn't even make it out the door.  Since Christmas isn't widely celebrated in Thailand it isn't a public holiday neither of course is Boxing Day so we were just lucky enough that it all fell on a weekend and Marcus was able to spend it with us. 
New Years here is different, the Thais do celebrate in the new year with alot of partying and public holidays.  Neighbours of ours who have twin 2 year old girls invited us to join them on a road trip to a town north of Bangkok called Ayutthaya for 3 days.  It is a lovely old city that many many centuries ago used to be Thailand's capital city. 

It is full of old ruined temples or Wats as they are called here and many relics.  It is a peaceful place, busy as it most cities of Thailand but without the hustle and bustle of the nightclubs and tourist bars with bar girls hanging outside.  Marcus mentioned to me that he hadn't seen a single Go Go Bar during our stay and I had to point out to him that aside from Pattaya, Bangkok and a couple of other high tourist attractions the majority of Thailand isn't built on the sex industry and is quite conservative. 

We stayed in a lovely little hotel on the banks of the Pa Sak River called the Krungsi River Hotel.  During the day we visited many of the ruins, soaking in the history and the sheer mammoth size of the towers at the Pagodas Ruins and many of the other temples. 

The kids didn't see the excitement, Judd mentioned to me several times "mummy why are we visiting this place again?" when it was a completely different site each time.  But they did enjoy the wide open spaces, the fields of grass which they could run freely without us worrying about motorbikes, cars or strangers. 



Laying down Buddha

 On our final day we saw 2 of the most frequented tourist attractions in Ayutthaya, the big gold Buddha at the Wat Pha Nan Cheng Temple which was really very impressive and quite mesmerizing in its size and beauty and a huge Wat called the Siamese Kingdom that also houses the famous laying down Buddha.  The day we chose to visit happened to be New Years Eve which is also a very auspicious day for Thai Buddhists, many many locals mixed in amongst some tourists were cramming these Wats offering their prayers for the old and new year.  I was quite overwhelmed.  The age and size of these monuments were amazing.  It was a nice change to see some Thai history and to get out of Pattaya for a while. 



The big Gold Buddha, very impressive.





Buddha in the tree



By the time we finished out sightseeing, crammed the kids back into the car and arrived home we were so exhausted that we didn't even see in the new year at midnight, we were both asleep by 10.30 that night.  But I wasn't disappointed, we had a great little family break away and to me we had already had a special NYE experience and I was content.

We have an exciting 2012 coming up and I am looking forward to what little adventures lay ahead.


Our family at the end of 2012