Family Staycation!

We've done a lot of traveling, and we have more traveling coming up, so for winter break, we decided to just savor what we have here in Bangkok.  That was made especially easy by good friends of ours who have a three bedroom apartment downtown and were on vacation for a few weeks.  They left us the keys and told us to enjoy, so Jeff and I packed up the girls and Young and headed downtown.

Big surprise, our main destinations were malls, but in our defense pretty much everything worth doing is in a mall in Thailand.  My theory is that it has to do with the heat.  You want to be in an airconditioned place as much as possible.

We got our staycation started by taking the BTS, which is novel enough for the girls to be fun.  It helps that when Thais see them, they stand up and offer their seats.  My girls are so spoiled by the wonderful people here.

Our first stop was family favorite mall Central World.  They have lots of free stuff for kids to do, but before playing we had to fuel up at one of the hundreds of restaurants.  Some friends had recommend the S'mores restaurant, and it did not disappoint.

Elena wasn't so sure about the bears.

But both girls liked that the menus were paper they could color on, and that there were good kids' choices on the menu.

After lunch, we stopped for a quick bathroom break before continuing into the main part of the mall.  The wall outside the bathroom has all these posters which Central commissioned from some artist.  This one cracked me up.

After our rest stop, we were ready to hit the free kids play area.  This is probably one of our favorite places to play.  There were a bunch of other families who felt that way too, but luckily there were no major collisions.

Once the girls got tired, we went to relax at the bookstore around the corner.

Then Young took Elena back to the apartment, and Vivian got to stay at the mall with us for a special preview showing of Sing, followed by an Auntie Anne's pretzel and Christmas decoration viewing.  Good times :-)

As I'm looking back through the pictures, I'm realizing that our staycation was 100% about food and malls.  Breakfast at Chu's was a must.  The girls got completely addicted to their pancakes.

I decided to mix up my chocolate choice a bit and discovered the Belgian chocolate with cinnamon on top.  New addiction!

We went back to Imaginia at the Emporium mall.  It was extra fun to bring Daddy this time.

Then we went across the street to yet another mall for yet another meal.  The EmQuartier mall is pretty new, and they have a really cool sprial design with lots of restaurants along they way.

We settled on the Mexican restaurant which had delicious food and a great view.

By the end of several days downtown, we were all ready to go back to the burbs.  Downtown Bangkok is amazingly fun, but we agreed that it's probably good that we don't live down there.  We would be broke and weigh 400 pounds each!