On December 31st, we spent the day at Ancient City, a large park to the southeast of Bangkok that contains lots of different traditional Thai buildings. Some of them are original buildings that have been moved there, and some of them are recreations. It's a huge park with crazy criss crossing roads. We had Elena with us for this trip, so we thought it would make the most sense to rent a golf cart to get around. We got a six seater for all of us.
It wasn't far from building to building, but all together it was three hours of exploring, which would have been too much for Elena, and probably for the older girls too. The trick was making sure that everyone was on the golf cart and sitting down before we started moving, since everyone kept hopping on and off.
There were some structures that resembled older Buddhist architecture.
And they had a "floating market" area with restaurants, but we opted not to eat there.
Most of our time was just spent looking at beautiful buildings and taking interesting photographs.
The girls enjoyed themselves, and we got some good pictures with them.
We ended up stopping at a mall nearby for lunch. Jeff took the older girls for KFC, while Elena and I went to the food court with Alice and Erik.
Our driver helped with the food court order, which was a fun adventure. The best part about the mall though, was that they had a place set up to sell mats, like the kind a lot of people use for massages. Jeff found himself the perfect green massage mat, and I think that made his day. He got to try it out with a massage that night. We didn't stay up too late, and everyone started the new year off relaxed and well rested.
We had looked into New Years brunches, but they were a couple hudred dollars per person, so we just made our own. Alice even helped with the sausage balls.
We planned a New Year's celebration for noon to coincide with midnight on the east coast. Jeff and Erik got party crowns for the girls, and we all celebrated together when the ball dropped in New York.
After some dancing and general craziness, we left the kids with Young, and the four adults went downtown for an evening out.
We wanted to let our friends experience one of our favorite parts of Bangkok, a roof top bar. We took them to Red Sky, but discovered that there is an even newer bar ABOVE Red Sky. It's a champagne bar called Cru, and it has a true 360 degree view of the city. When the hostess asked if we were interested in trying it out, we said sure, and up we went. There was no food, only drinks and nuts, and the prices included the view, but it was fun for one sunset drink. They even had a mango champagne cocktail, which is what I got of course.
My favorite picture is the one I got of the Red Sky arch I look for every time I drive into Bangkok. The Centara is my favorite base to see the city from.
After drinking in the sunset, we were ready for some dinner, so we went down a few floors to Uno Mas, the tapas restaurant in the Centara. It's billed as semi-alfresco, since it has half windows.
The food is really good, but my friends are even more adventurous than me, and they ordered the suckling pig. Since it's a house special, they do a whole elaborate serving ritual where they cut it with a plate (to show how tender it is) and then smash the plate on the "floor" (in a container). It was quite something. I was definitely a little squeemish about eating a whole pig, but not Alice. She took the tail!
I appreciate friends who stretch my food boundaries :-)
It was hard to follow up such a fun night out, but we managed to do it by adding the big girls back into the mix. Young's niece brought them downtown in a taxi, and we took them to Kidzania. Now that they're both eight, they're old enough to go in without parents. We said good bye at the "airport."
While they were having their kid fun, the parents got some childish fun in too. We went to see The Great Wall (an over the top Matt Damon action movie about fictional lizard creatures trying to attack China, stopped only by the Great Wall and intrepid warriors) in 4D. Yes, four. The seats moved, and there were air and smoke effects. It was pretty crazy, but fun.
After the movie, we went and picked the girls up and took them for some window shopping (and a jedi battle)
followed by lunch at Siam Paragon.
You can see from Vivian's expression in this picture that her Kidzania independence had made her less tolerant of a mom who likes to take pictures.
After all our crazy fun, the Viilus went to Siem Reap for a few days, and then came back for one more day of Thai food and massages before heading back to the States. We were sad to see them go, but so glad they made it over to the other side of the world to hang out with us.
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