It is so unbelievably strange to think that I started writing this travel blog just over a year ago, before embarking on my adventures through South America. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I would be posting another Christmas edition...this time from Thailand! Crazy how things turn out...

The week after my last entry was a disappointing time for me...as a suprise, Sarah and I had been scheming for months to organise a fly-by visit back home to make a celebrity appearance at my Mum`s 60th birthday in the last week of November. My bags were packed, my flight re-confirmed, and the plans for the Grand Surprise were all in place...and then the political protests by the yellow-shirt-wearing-hand-clapper-waving  anti-government P.A.D group spoiled everything! I was due to fly out on the Thursday, but Bangkok`s airport was closed early on Tuesday morning and didnt reopen for almost a week....it was bitterly disappointing for all of us :( But thanks to Skype, I was still able to `be` at the party for a little while and it was so great to see Mum having a wonderful time...all from the comfort of my Bangkok bedroom. Bugger :)  An upside of the airport closure was the chance to catch up with two mates from Bathurst, Penny and Mandy, who were stuck trying to get out of Thailand and head back to Australia. Our little apartment was packed to the rafters for a few days while the `refugees` figured out how to get back home asap. It was great to catch up and see some familiar faces :)

While Baby Ryan was busy turning 1 in December back home in Australia, the little kids here were busy preparing for Christmas. It was strange to see the incredible Christmas decorations all over the capital city of a Buddhist country! As our school is technically a Catholic school (although only a very small minority of students are Catholic), we were lucky enough to get the Christmas and New Year break as our school closed down (whereas most Thai government schools stayed open).  Instead of a Christmas tree, this year Kara, Ben and I decided to decorate our most revered household appliance - our beloved fan, with whom we could not live without :) So day by day, the Christmas fan acquired an assortment of new and random decorations...and by the time Christmas rolled around, it was packed with pressies too!!

The days leading up to Christmas saw us decorating classrooms (some boys enjoying it more than others...I`ve never seen kids get so excited about tinsel!!), singing Christmas carols (`Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer` was a huge hit..mainly, I fear, because of Miss Teresa`s dodgy actions),  having a big Christmas party for the beautiful kids at Kindy, and (for me at least) gallavanting around Bangkok trying to muster up all of the ingredients required to make rumballs (after a long and tiring hunt, I found them all. Strangely enough, in a country overflowing with coconuts, the desiccated variety was the hardest ingredient to find. God, those rumballs were good.)

School broke up on the 23rd of December and at 1am on the 24th I got the biggest Christmas present of all...Fletch arrived at Bangkok airport :) He was dragging with him 27 kilos of luggage...of which 5 kgs were his clothes and stuff, and 22 kgs were presents for me from Woy Woy!! :) All my Christmases really did come at once when I saw him walk out of arrivals...a real live Santa :) Hehehe.

The school had a Christmas fair/fete on Christmas Eve and we all went along to that, trying our luck hooping ducks and shooting ping pong balls on the little sidestalls, wishing we were little enough to still go on the jumping castle, and wishing to God that the megaphone had never been invented - for a `quiet` culture, the Thais can certainly make a hell of a racket! Christmas Eve was spent at a rather bizarre Christmas Mass (all in English and run by an expat church...but it was a Children`s Mass so it was more like a giant workshop with kids running around with teatowels on their heads). After tea with another teacher and his girlfriend after mass, we headed home, wondering if Santa would find us here in Thailand.

Would you believe it...that old fat guy is pretty smart! We woke up on Christmas day to 5 stuffed stockings in the lounge room - one for each of us, and one for Loy, our fish. Yay! Christmas morning was so much fun..opening all of our pressies, chatting to the family on Skype, singing Christmas carols with Hayden, Amy, Felicity and Ryan from the other side of the world and eating rumballs and drinking red wine for brekky. It was a very memorable Christmas morning.

Once the last present had been unwrapped and no more rumballs could physically be consumed, we headed out to Lumphini Park for a Christmas picnic lunch. We were joined by a few other teachers from school and had a funtastic afternoon.  We had raided Bangkok`s `western-style` supermarkets and shelled out the big baht for some of the creature comforts of home. Alcohol is banned in Lumphini Park, so it was really lucky we were only drinking red juice. And also really lucky that the park guard could be easily bribed with camembert cheese and biccies to believe that our red juice wasn`t wine, and that we were just hyper from all of the lollies :P We had such a great Christmas day, and for me the best part was having Fletch there to share it all with :)

But there was so much more fun in store, as the next day we flew out to Krabi for our holiday in the Andamen islands...but thats a story for another day :) Hope you all enjoyed a fantastic Christmas too....

Hasta la proxima!

xoxox :)