Christmas trip Part 1- Thailand

It's hard to be away from home for Christmas, so for the three Christmases I've spent away from home I've traveled. My poor husband, has spent many more Christmases away from home, but he handles it better than I do- he handles most of life better than me as well! :) This year we decided to travel around another part of Asia we'd never been. We found some good priced tickets going to Singapore, so we bought them and started planning. We found out it's pretty easy to travel through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, so we decided to head straight to Bangkok from Singapore and then work our way back down to Singapore over the next week. Over the next couple days we'll put up pictures to show what we saw. It was a once in a lifetime trip, and we won't bore you with all the stories, but if you have an extra 4 hours on your hands, give us a call, and we'll give you the long story! :)



Sitting in the tuk tuk in Bangkok. We only got to ride it once, but it's a fun way to travel. We were all about public transportation on this trip!



Uche enjoying the river taxi. Another great way to get around Bangkok. Sometimes we weren't sure what stop to get off at, but we just figured we'd follow the other foreigners since they hopefully knew where to go. The strategy worked pretty well actually.


View from river taxi. Not a sight you see everyday... unless, of course, you live in Bangkok. We really enjoyed seeing sights from the river. You can see how big these river taxis are.

This was outside the Grand Palace- not bad for a self portrait. This was before we decided to pay the admission to go inside. We debated whether to spend the money since admission was over $10 a person, and we were budget traveling.

We were glad we paid to go inside or we couldn't have gotten a picture like this! We have a lot of pictures from inside, but we'll only post a few here. Everytime we turned a corner we'd see another amazing building.

We had to wear long pants inside. In fact, they wouldn't let you enter in shorts. So, outside the palace there were quite a few small shops renting sarongs and pants to people who weren't in dress code. We had our handy dandy zip off pants to wear, so we didn't look ridiculous wearing the rented clothes. I tried to get a picture of a guy wearing purple pants he had rented, but couldn't manage it!

Isn't this building gorgeous? The colors were fantastic! Towards the end of our time there we were just overwhelmed with the beauty of the place and it was hard to get excited for another fantastic building.

The shapes of the buildings were so different from anything we'd seen before. There were lots of people taking pictures, so sometimes it was a bit of a juggling act to get a picture without other people in it.

The buildings were huge, as you can see in relation to me. The Grand Palace was totally worth the entrance fee, so if you get a chance to go see it- do!

On Christmas Eve we traveled from Bangkok to Hua Hin which is a beach town about 3 hours from Bangkok. We only had one night there, but once we arrived we wished we could stay much longer. It was great!

After we arrived in town we wandered around checking out the beach, restaurants, markets, etc. I had seen on the internet that there was an international church that met at the Hilton, and we had talked about seeing if they were doing any special services while we were there, but we didn't know where the Hilton was. As we were walking along the beach we looked up, and there was the Hilton! So, we went inside to see what we could find out. At the time we were both in our bathing suits- totally not dressed for the Hilton! They told us the church would be having a Christmas Eve service in 30 minutes. We rushed down the road to a restaurant for dinner since we hadn't eaten in a long time and scarfed down some fabulous food and went to the service bathing suits and all! It was a wonderful service and we met some neat people and it was soooo nice to fellowship with brothers and sisters during this special holiday service. After the service we headed back to the hotel, but were distracted by a night market on the way where we spent a couple hours eating fun stuff and just hanging out there.

Christmas morning breakfast- mocha, vanilla latte, chocolate croissant and almond croissant! :) For most the trip we ate street food- lots of rice and noodles, but for Christmas morning I forced Uche to go to this coffee shop because I just couldn't do rice on Christmas morning!

This was our spot for Christmas Day. We sat here, swam, sat some more, ate, sat some more and swam again. It was super relaxing!

This was the first Christmas I'd spent at the beach. It's a great way to spend Christmas if you can't be home with family. There were lots of people to watch and the sand and breeze felt great!

The Hilton is the large hotel in the background. We didn't take too many pictures at the beach because we were too busy relaxing and enjoying it! :)

Unfortunately we had to leave Hua Hin Christmas night. We took a bus from there to Penang, Malaysia. I'm looking a little red as I wait for the bus...

Stay tuned for more trip pictures....