Christmas Eve

Did you know that today is Christmas Eve? Well it is for the Beatties in Bangkok. We go down to Krabi on Sunday and can’t take presents so we’re celebrating it early.

We’re going down to Krabi by train because we’d psyched ourselves up for the Trans-Siberian express (and we didn’t quite trust the airports!) Luckily we came to our senses when we discovered the kind of temperatures that journey would entail.

We’ve kind of cocked up the notion of family Christmas traditions by being expats. We used to have traditions but they’ve had to go by the wayside. I wondered if we could at least take the stockings for the kids on the right day. I asked Husband to check the train details for luggage stowability.

Husband: We’ve confirmed the arrangements for carry-on vs hold bags and it depends on size.

Me: Okay. What are the sizes?

Husband: "small enough" and "too big". Thai standard sizes!

Phew, I’m glad we sorted that out.

So Christmas day is tomorrow in our house and the 25th will be a mystery waiting to happen. Last year the children jumped out of a box at my parents’ house and nearly gave their cousins a heart attack. I was at Skyros and Husband came down to join me on Christmas Eve. On Christmas day there was a Skyros organised trip to Ban Bao fishing village for lunch and the highlight of the trip for me was seeing these monkeys on the rocks on the way.

Contemplating Christmas

The Beattie family (that’s us) may have taken leave of their senses.

The best holiday we ever had was in China a year after we moved to Thailand. I might blog about it at some point. I wrote two exercise books full and haven’t looked at it since. I rather thought it might be the kind of holiday that you enjoyed after the event. However, it was fabulous at the time. It made me realise what wonderful, adaptable children we’d brought up, who’d learned that they could ‘speak’ an international sign language, and they weren’t afraid to use it. I shall never forget watching Son (who learned ‘Hello’ and ‘thank you’ in Chinese) asking a Chinese waitress, who spoke no English, for a toothpick.

So we’ve been contemplating Christmas… we’re not going home, what shall we do? We toyed with a few things and nothing got me going; until now.

We are exploring the possibility of flying to Moscow, taking Trans-Siberian Railway for five days to Mongolia and then having five days there, before flying home.

Today I emailed the company to see if there is availability. I discovered on the website that it’s -40 degrees at this time of year. Hmmm. I emailed Husband, and this was his response:

-40, that's minus forty degrees centigrade (or Fahrenheit).

You do realise that is level 4 on the Beaufort Beattie Shiver Scale?

Scale shown below:

0 (+5 to 0 degrees) - cold, need jumper and coat,
1 (0 to -10) - bloody cold, need to wear skiing gear. water freezes
2 (-10 to -20) -f**king cold, colder than it gets in the UK, need to wear two sets of skiing gear, rivers and small animals freeze
3 (-20 to -30) - cold isn't the word for it, need to wear arctic explorer gear, icebergs and glaciers form, people and large animals freeze.
4 (-30 to -40) - nowhere this cold on earth, no data, similar to outer space. entire planets freeze.

I should point out, that the Powers That Be decided half way through our childhoods to change the scale, from Fahrenheit to Centigrade, thereby ensuring we never understand either. We were lucky really to understand the new money.