Thailand for Christmas… when my husband suggested it a couple of years ago, I looked up from my work in confusion. What’s there? I always hear of people going, but what do they do when they get there?

For such a big holiday destination, Thailand is very quiet about what it actually has to offer. I looked up “where to go in Thailand” and got very little in the way of useful answers. I looked up “things to see in Thailand” and the articles about that were equally nebulous. Everyone we knew had been, and thought it was great, but no one could tell us what they’d done while they were there.

Basically, it seemed that people went to see elephants and… wear baggy trousers?

Being quite partial to wearing skirts, and not liking the idea of riding a captive elephant, I wasn’t convinced this would be our greatest holiday ever, but I went along with it because my husband seemed pretty excited about the whole thing.

I left it to him to book the plane tickets and accommodation and I worked on figuring out what we would do when we got there. He picked Bangkok as our initial destination, which at least I’d heard of, and I looked around for things to do.

We didn’t realize just how ENORMOUS a city Bangkok is. It’s huge. We were living in China in a city of 10 million when we went on holiday to Thailand and we were still amazed by how big Bangkok is. We were staying quite far out, so we only went into the city centre once, and the rest of the time, we stayed in our district.

After a few days of working during the day and enjoying excellent food at night, we moved on to Pattaya. I don’t see Pattaya really mentioned as a destination by any travel bloggers, so I’ll do a thorough rundown of the city in a separate article.

This was the view from our first Bangkok hotel (we had a great view of another hotel’s pool):

And this was the actual pool at our hotel. It was great for my husband who is a strong swimmer, as it was set up for swimming lengths. I didn’t go in because I’m not a great swimmer and it takes me a while to get water-confident:

This pool’s shape did inspire me though that when we finally bought our next home, we could maybe have a pool in a much smaller space than I imagined. I think this was about two metres wide.

The time in Bangkok was largely R and R, and we didn’t really make it a priority to see or do anything, instead, we enjoyed soaking up the atmosphere and tasting the delicious food.

When it was time to move on, we got from Bangkok to Pattaya on a bus. We took a taxi to the bus station, got a bus to Pattaya, then got in this weird transport vehicle that was like being in the back of one of those army jeeps with the sideways benches and an open back (no seatbelts haha). I was super-dubious about the safety of this vehicle but it got us to our hotel just fine, so I think I was worrying over nothing.

Overall, Thailand does a pretty good job of Christmastime. They decorate trees, put up lights, and it’s generally an uplifting place to be. Definitely a top spot for winter sun.