New Year's Eve and New Year's Day

We decided that the only way to celebrate our first new year in Thailand was to celebrate in style!! I booked us into the coolest hotel I have ever stayed in.

It's called Reflection Rooms and I think the concept is brilliant - each room has been decorated by a different designer, both Thai and International, so have a completely different feel to them. http://www.reflections-thai.com/rooms.html#rooms (We stayed in room 406). We were not 100% sure where it was but managed to spot it pretty easily 'It will be the big pink building then' was Chris's comment. We checked in and were shown to our room - it was fab (Chris admitted that it was pretty weird but in a good way) and had the biggest bed I have ever seen (Not sure why since Thai's are so small but Chris was thrilled because for once his feet didn't hang off the end). There was an invitation to attend pre-dinner cocktails which we decided to go along to (Well, it would have been rude not to!!)

We had a lovely afternoon - went for a walk to explore the area and ended up sitting watching the world go by whilst eating Lychee and Strawberry sorbet (Very yummy - if not a little weird given the fact that it was New Years Eve and really we should have been freezing our butts off!!). We then bought a couple of beers and headed back to the hotel - a very relaxing start to our evening (A pity it didn't stay that way but I'll get to that)

We headed down to the veranda by the pool (Which was really beautiful....lots of little lanterns dotted about) and had a couple of rum cocktails and some pre-dinner nibbles. The atmosphere was very chilled and we sat chatting till it was time to head over to the restaurant for dinner. Like the rest of the hotel, the restaurant was very quirky - it looked like it had a giant paper squid hanging outside it and had a very strange array of rather scary looking dolls which you could buy (Why you would want to is beyond me!!).

We had just ordered when Chris got a text message saying that there were bombs going off in Bangkok and that we should stay indoors. At this point the waiter put on the TV in the restaurant (There was one in the corner) but it was all in Thai so we knew that bombs had gone off but not where or how many. We just had to take comfort in the fact that the reports we were watching didn't show any injured people and there were no scenes of devastation (I'm sure we all remember the images shown on TV when the London Tube was bombed). Sadie phoned, having seen the news in the UK, and once she was assured that we were fine she was able to give us a bit more information (It's ridiculous when you think about it - we were actually in the country but had to rely on someone from Scotland to tell us what was going on).

The food at the restaurant was lovely (Thai and Japanese) but, as you can imagine, all we really wanted to do was to sit in front of an english news channel and find out exactly what was going on (There had been more reports by this time). This turned out to be surprisingly difficult, the hotel had no satellite channels and the only computer for guests was being used, but the receptionist took pity on us and let us use his computer so at least we then knew how many bombs had gone off, where the bombs had gone off and how many people had been hurt.

We saw in the bells sitting by the pool watching a cat chase after her three (Very cute) kittens as they jumped about the bushes trying to bite each others tails. It was a very strange evening.

New Years Day was quiet - we didn't stray very far from the house (Only popping out for some pizza) but by the 2nd everything had pretty much got back to normal.