Wind In My Head: With compliments
Wind In My Head
Thursday, December 13, 2007
With compliments
We got back from our first vacation away from the kids on Monday. It's Thursday, that's how long it's taken me to sit down and blog about it. I'm only going to blog about part 1 of the holiday. Part 2 was basically uninteresting, eating and shopping and mostly uneventful although I did ride a tuk tuk at least twice a day, I learnt how to say thank you in Thai and I also learnt that the Thai people love their king so much, on the 5th of Dec, most of Thailand donned yellow clothes as a mark of respect to His Majesty on his 90th birthday. Yellow being the royal colour.Part 1 of the holiday was the luxurious, plurge and be happy part of it. We went to the Banyan Tree in Phuket with the sole purpose of being pampered. And pampered we were, so much so that we regretted not staying another night. This started the minute we got off the plane where we were picked up in style. Muzak, chilled water, cold towels scented with eucalyptus. On top of that, the minute the car arrived at the porch, we had an army of staff descend upon us, each addressing us by our names.
Of course, it didn't hurt to have told them we were on our honeymoon so our check in was expedited and a bottle of champagne awaited us in the villa. And this was to much joy since it was going to be my first drink in more than a year.
I had heard great things about the Banyan Tree but it didn't prepare me for the buggy chauffeurs who would buggy us from point A in the resort to point B even if point B was 10 metres in front of you. Neither did it prepare me for the villa with its raised bed that overlooked our private pool and gazebo
where we had a chef come in to cook us our own private barbeque which consisted of lobster, prawns with heads the size of my fist, snapper and other seafood. We ate by the pool in candlelight with champagne.
The problem with only staying two nights was that we didn't have time to do everything we wanted to do. There was our pool and sunbed that we hardly used because for once, we willingly spent a great amount of time in the ocean. As a rule, Packrat hates the ocean. Something to do with having watched too many shark movies and the sea water being sticky. Of course, when the ocean looks like this, and the sand in the water is velvety soft and smooth, it
becomes quite a different story. I think it helped that it wasn't blistering but it was warm enough to need to cool down in the ocean. Packrat says that the next time we are there and in all likelihood, we had such a good time that there will be a next time, we should just go for the villa without the pool. That would remove the guilt we felt for neglecting our pool and sunbed.
And the reason why I didn't learn the 'thank you' bit till we hit Bangkok was that all the staff spoke passable English and we didn't really need to struggle to be understood.
Now that I've looked at the photos again, I really miss the ocean. Now if only I were a minister in Singapore awaiting the second part of my pay raise, then we could go back and we could bring the kids and not worry about the cost.
Technorati Tags: vacation, Banyan Tree Phuket
Ondine tossed this thought in at 23:03
