Last day of 2009!

Semi babysitting day. Mee wanted to take her son to Dream World which is the largest amusement park in Thailand, I think. BUT do not let that statement fool you!

To picture Dream World, think Disneyland, but 10x smaller, 20x more crowded, and 30 degrees warmer.

Yup, that’s about it for this giant theme park. Pretty much hell on earth. A perfect place for kids! *lol*

We were sweating like crazy as soon as we stepped outside our car, it was a brutally hot day. Then, add tons of people on holiday break on top of that, I was pretty much dead by the time we got our admission tickets! We didn’t really do much besides walking around, taking pictures, and trying (unsuccessfully) to hide from the sun. lol

our little navigator ♥

off wandering around

looking kinda lost with two babysitters *lol*

My favorite spot was this (fake) Snow Land. We had to wait in line for almost an hour to get in there, were forced to put on these blue jackets (which I refused to think how many people put them on before us since they last washed them D:) and some damped boots. BUT at least it’s cold inside!! I felt like I was back home~ lol

We thought Palm would enjoy it since it’s nice and cold and bright and everything. Turned out, he’s scared of this place. Maybe because everyone looked the same (outfit-wise) so he got confused or maybe it’s just the icy snow surface? He just clung on to either his dad or his mom and wouldn’t touch the ground.

We got out of Snow Land, 2 of my friends left, mainly due to exhaustion. The rest of us walked around for a little while longer before heading out to the parking lot.

Palm totally passed out even before we reached our car. LOL
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In short: Palm was still too young for amusement park, and we were approaching a getting-old-phase, fast! LOL

An awesome day to close the book on 2009! ♥

December 26, 2009

My best friend, Mee, came to visit me with her son, Palm~ OMG HE’S SO CUTE!

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December 27, 2009

BIG lunch. Japanese buffet at Keyaki Restaurant on 22nd floor of the Pan Pacific Hotel.

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December 28, 2009

Thai body massage could be seriously painful.

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December 29, 2009

If you’re curious, I didn’t gain weight during this trip. Surprisingly enough, I actually lost a few pounds, even with all these crazy food consumptions. lol It’s a magic of walking and sweating, I’m telling you~ ;)

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December 30, 2009

Wednesday (again). Busy day.

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Merry Christmas!

I’d been wanted to go to sunflower fields for the longest time, but I could never fit it into my schedule when I went back to Thailand, either it’s not a sunflower season, or I had other travel plans.

This year, during one of the Facebook message-bombarding-session before my trip back home, I mentioned that I wanted to go to Ayutthaya. One of my friends, pEmm (pee’ emm ~ pee = older brother/sister/friend) took on that request and sent me a list of places to choose from. I saw SUNFLOWER FIELD on the list and I practically bounced! A little bugging and begging later, my other friend, pPle (pee’ (ap)ple) decided to also come along on this day trip, and YAY I’m going to Disneyland!! sunflower field!!

I couldn’t thank pEmm  and pPle enough as they both also had to take a day off since Christmas was so not a public holiday in Thailand~

We left Bangkok early in the morning to avoid traffic, and stopped for a quick breakfast at BaanSuan.

Heavy breakfast, indeed. LOL Stewed pork leg on rice with pickled cabbage. Totally worth risking cholesterol spike, it’s so yummy!

Off we go, destination Lopburi!

Lopburi is a small province about 100 miles northeast of Bangkok. The town is famous for its Monkey Festival where local peeps set up a Chinese round table party for the monkeys in town. Yup, Monkey. Hundreds of them. These monkeys are not afraid of human as they have a bad habit of jumping on people and snatching food from our hands. You’ve been warned! ;)

It took us almost two hours to get to the fields, all the way having fun with my friend’s navigator system in his car. We called it ‘Somsri‘ (soam+see) which pretty much equivalent to Jane Doe. Let me tell you that Thai GPS machine was hilarious, the way they translated into Thai was nothing short of subbing-from-hell. I cracked up several times during this trip because of its choice of words XD

Anyway, back to sunflowers!

Stepping-on-the-field fee, THB5 (~20 cents)

from the back

Bright sunny happy flowers~ :)

My favorite shots are from pEmm’s camera. He made me want to buy 10-22mm and 70-200mm lens so bad~ Expensive!!!!

♥ a photographer wannabe~ LOL

Saw this buffalo on the way to Saraburi, haven’t seen one with long horns in a long time!

Next, we traveled south to Wat Phra Buddha Bat (Buddha’s Footprint Temple) in Saraburi, less than an hour south of Lopburi (if confused about my route, Google map is your best friend. Just sayin’~lol). This Royal Temple was constructed almost 400 years ago by the order of King Drondharm (full Thai title: Somdet Phra Chao Songtham) of Ayutthaya dynasty.

Lesson from the temple court: love is the cause of sadness

Hilarious moment with Somsri (GPS)

We’re about to leave the temple for lunch, so we used Somsri to search for restaurants in the area. pEmm told pPle to pick one restaurant out of hundreds that popped up. pPle did pick one with a very nice name, so we drove there and found that the place went out of business already! LOL Should have bought a lotto with this kind of odd!

Anyway, we ended up at a small open air restaurant instead. Delicious lunch presented crispy pork on rice with gravy~

After lunch, we hit a few temples in Ayutthaya. I think one big thing about temples, you kinda need to know the history of the country/city/town/people, in order to appreciate each temple more.

And you can read a partial history of Ayutthaya → here ←

First stop at Wat Nah Phra Men (official name: Wat Meru Racha Ga Rarm), the only temple in Ayutthaya that wasn’t destroyed by Myanmar troops (Burma, back then) during the war since they use this temple as a command center.

Hi-tech donation machine. Press 1 to donate 1 Baht. Press 2 to donate 9 Baht. Press 3 to donate 19 Baht. Press 4 to donate 99.99 Baht (since when did Thailand have 1 satang (.01 Baht) coin?! lol not counting those collectible coins that released in special occasion a few years back yo! I know it’s just a banking transaction but still weird to see .99) Or punch in desired amount. Fancy.

Lying Buddha at Wat Loga Yasutha

After getting lost with Somsri for a big while, we found this temple, Wat Narng Gui, where Smiling Buddha resided.

The Narayana on Garuda symbol on the gable meant the temple was founded/built by the order of the King.

Last stop for the day, Giant Buddha at Wat Phanan Choeng (officially called Wat Phanan Choeng Wora Wiharn)

Dinner time~ at Pae Krung Kao, a country style restaurant on a river bank. From top left clockwise: Stir-fried fish maw // Baked shrimp with vermicelli (goong oab woon sen) // Fried egg with cha-om leaves // Deep-fried fish with curry sauce. Too much food for 3 people~ LOL

It was an incredible Christmas day! I had a great time with pEmm and pPle. And I actually missed Somsri a lot~ lol

ps: still want a wild angle lens. 10-22mm, wait for me~~~~~

December 22, 2009

Resting day.

Hey, even a machine needed some downtime, and I ain’t no machine yo! ;)

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December 23, 2009

Wednesday. (so? lol)

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December 24, 2009

My best friend from school took a day off to come hang out with me today~ ♥

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An annual trip for the Four Gangsters.

A-san, I-san, T-chan and I got together again for a hilariously gossiping trip. The girls sure had tons of news to update me during these 3 fun-filled days.

When we were picking out locations for our trip, SuanPhueng came up as a strong candidate because of Candle in the Winter festival. We kinda thought, oh, it must be really pretty, let’s go! LOL

SuanPhueng (suan = garden/farm, phueng = bee, so SuanPhueng = bee garden/farm – nope, there’s no bee flying around as far as I could tell~) is a small town in Ratchaburi (racha = the king, buri = city/town, Ratchaburi = city of the king. I believe we actually pronounced it ‘rach-boo-ree’ not ‘rat-cha-boo-ree’ but I might be wrong..) province on the western part of Thailand. In the past Ratchaburi was really prosperous as a well-diversified frontier (Thai/Myanmar border).

Anyway, back to our trip! Though our destination was less then 2 hours away from Bangkok, we decided to rent a van (and a driver) to SuanPhueng instead of driving there ourselves. And to lower the cost/head, A-san’s sister, I-san’s brother and his GF and I-san’s sister were dragged along on this trip!

As for accommodation, we stayed at 2 completely different resorts: DuanLom and Panalee. You’ll see from the photos how different they are. LOL

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#1

Mr. Driver picked us up from different spots around Bangkok. We then headed to Nakhon Pathom (nakhon = city/town, pathom = 1st, so Nakhon Pathom is usually referred as the first city of Thailand) to pay homage to Phra Pathom Chedi, the tallest stupa in the world. This stupa also houses sacred Buddha relics. When we got there, the stupa was going through a restoration process (for quite some time now, according to the local)

the sign said “danger” lol

After walking around for a while, we moved on to our destination, SuanPhueng. By the time we got there, it was way past lunch time, so we went to one small restaurant called “Krua Kareang”. Apparently we needed to make a reservation to eat here (who would have thought?!). The funny part was that the girl who came out to greet us was definitely Myanmar, and Thai people adored Myanmar accents so very much ever since we had that illegal-Myanmar-labor-flooding-into-Thailand problem several years ago. We joked about her “no reservation no eat” greeting for the entire trip.

Anyway, hungry to the max, we moved one quickly to our next choice, “Baan Horm Tien” (bann = house, horm = nice scent, tien = candle → together it means house with nice candle scent, or something along that line lol) which was a resort, restaurant and candle shop, all in one. OMG we waited forever for food! It was soooooo slow, but really yummy!

hungry peeps~ ;)

some food we ate~ (from top left, clockwise) E-Lian (whatever it means) Duck (where there’s hardly any duck meat) with tons of red onion and green onion // Stir-fried daylily // The crispiest fried egg on earth (for real) //Black pepper pork

After re-energized ourselves with food, we walked over to the candle store, where you could buy various kinds of candles, candle related products, and also make your own candle.

Candle 101: put a stick of wick in the middle of a plastic cube, pour some ice in, then pour hot/melted wax in, more ice, more wax, mixing colors, until it’s full, dump the whole thing in cold water, pop the container open, tada, you got yourself a one of a kind candle! These were the unsuccessful ones though~ ↓ lol

btw, potpourri/scented candle/incense was never my thing, I usually get a headache if I have to spend too much time in this kind of stores. LOL

Next, we went to Duanlom Resort where we spent our first night. Duanlom was a small Mediterranean style resort where each house had its own theme: flower, heart, warmth, star, dream, etc. We split into 3 houses, A-san let me choose which house I wanted, and I picked this FANCY one! LOL

Colorful, huh? Wait till you see inside of this house. Every single wall was painted in different colors!

on the bathroom floor~ lol

Duanlom was definitely not a 5-star resort, building quality wasn’t that great/neat, but it’s kinda fun to walk around and take pictures. :)

Around 5pm, we left Duanlom Resort to Candle in the Winter festival at Scenery Resort (and the reason why we didn’t stay at Scenery was because that place was fully booked til 2010 or 2011 or whatever!). Again, don’t expect snow or ice like when we went to yuki akari no michi in Otaru, Japan back in 2006. It’s Thailand peeps, think tropical! Or at best, spring weather. LOL

Actually, legend said that SuanPhueng was usually cold during winter time. I was told to bring my light jacket with me, which I didn’t do, and I was sweating for most of the night! HA! Urban legend indeed!

By the way, when I said festival, don’t think of a state fair or something, it’s way smaller than that LOL Here we only had light-up, some overpriced products, food, games, and a jazzy-country-ish band that cracked us up to Pluto. I would never understand Thai people who tried to sound like foreigners when singing Thai songs! The singer’s accent was totally over-killed, to the point that we all wanted to headdesk.

Oh, I-san’s brother’s girlfriend won this giant cat from playing game. See, even the cat turned its back to the concert stage! LOL

Seriously, I missed T&T and David Cook’s concerts so terribly!

missing someone, A-san? ;)

Sheep was Scenery Resort’s attraction. LOL I don’t know why they picked sheep, but ‘feed-the-sheep’ was a very popular thing for tourists~

sleeping sheep~ they’re so cute! ↓

BTW, it was really dusty, walking around in the dried/cracked field, even with grass. For someone who used a Ziploc bag as her camera bag, it was a big problem. I didn’t have a single cleaning tool with me. My filter was probably scratched to no end that night since I used whatever I could find to wipe it clean LOL

We went back to Duanlom Resort a little before midnight. After a quick shower, jet lag started taking control, I passed out.

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#2

Woke up around 8am. We had breakfast at the resort’s restaurant, then went to hang out at A-san’s Flower house until lunch time. Again, some food we ate~

(from top left, clockwise) Tuna salad (I ordered it without onion, I first got it without tuna LOL yeah, a tuna salad without tuna! *shakes head*) // Deer steak with Duanlom sauce // Steak with French sauce // Crocodile meat (tasted like chicken+pork) with chili sauce.

We left Duanlom resort around 2pm, heading to the place to stay for this second night, Panalee Home and Camping.

new trip member ↓

Panalee resort had a nicer location than Duanlom. The settings were more blended to the scenery, African style, according to their website lol

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The cottage/home itself was built with nice design and materials. What I liked most about this place was this bathroom! It’s the kind that you had to climb up the steps to go to the shower area. Pretty neat, if you ask me~ :)

We asked the staff if there’s anything to do around the area, and got a blank face as an answer. LOL So we decided to just follow the tiny sign to their view point. After about 10 minutes on the trail, we reached this spot. Oh view point. Well, it’s pretty much the same as viewing it from our cottage’s roof! :P

Anyway, we had a great time with a mini photo session of ‘how to look like kids these days’. Kinda how to pose, how to look at the camera while remain cute and innocent-ish.

Totally failed, laughter guaranteed. lol

We ended up in the living room, consuming all snacks we bought, gossiping about everything from work to clients to celebrities, all afternoon. Good time~

Then, we kinda need real food for dinner, so here we go!

(from top left, clockwise) Onion with cashew nuts, dried pepper and chicken spirit (seriously, hardly find any chicken meat!) // Glass noodle salad (darn spicy) // Deep-fried tiny fish // Fish maw salad

After dinner, we watched some TV shows til almost midnight, while continuing our gossip-spree. LOL

Lazy trip was awesome!

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#3

It’s kinda weird going on a trip with A-san without an agenda. Normally, my trips with her were packed with activities everyday LOL

After breakfast, we’re just relaxing inside the house until almost check-out time, then went to an orchid farm about 15 minutes away. I-san finally found a souvenir for her mom who’s very into gardening at the moment ;)

We went back to Scenery Resort to feed the sheep as good tourists should do, and to feed ourselves, not necessarily at the same time, btw.

So, sheep first! We paid THB40 for some leaves, and as soon as we stepped down to the feeding area, we were attacked by these hungry sheep! OMG they were really aggressive! A-san, who’s really small, got pushed down and was kicked on her chest! XD

Here’s I-san showing how to feed them properly (or safely, maybe? lol)

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soulmates~ lol

We walked around, petting some less aggressive sheep, taking some photos before heading off to a very late lunch at Scenery’s Honey Scene Restaurant

(from top left, clockwise) Shrimp on eggplant salad // German sausages that didn’t look or taste really german-ish // Crispy shrimp with curry sauce // German pork hocks (OMG yummmmy)

The only group photo of this trip LOL For real, with 7 cameras, this was the only group shot of the eight of us!

It was a really fun, crack-filled trip that I totally enjoyed. Though I have to agree with I-san, next trip, let’s go back to the beach~ BEACHES >>>>>> MOUNTAINS, anytime! LOL

Wonder where we’ll be our next destination together! Cannot wait!!

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