Happy New Year!

It seems like I have only been posting for holidays at the moment. My last post was about Christmas and now I'm wishing you all a happy new year. A lot has happened between now and my last post, I just haven't had enough time to write about all of it. Hopefully I'll be able to play catch up for some of the important things.

I would like to wish everyone reading this a very happy new year. May God continue to surround you in his care throughout the year 2013 and provide you with everything that you need. May he give you the strength to walk in the path that he has established for you and may you hold fast to his promises.

So what has been happening to me since christmas? Well I guess the biggest thing is that I had a long weekend off for the new year (we had both New Years Eve and New Years Day off). A few of us volunteers made our way to Koh Chang, and Island South of Bangkok which is found near the border of Thailand and Cambodia. It was a really nice weekend away.

The place where we stayed on the Island was right on the beach. When we got off the ferry we took a song-tau to the main road, found a path leading to the beach and walked right along the beach to our resort. A lot of the resorts, hotels, restaurants and some bars are all right along the beach so we stayed on the beach for 90% of our time on the beach. We spent the day there, we ate all our meals right there and we slept there. The only time we left there was to look at the market stalls and to get some snacks from 7-eleven.

Where we stayed and some of the other places that were right there on the beach

One of the downsides of the island is that a lot of tourists were there, especially because it was New Year's and at the moment it is peak season for tourism in Thailand. The beach was really busy and full of very sunburnt people which I didn't really enjoy but still, it was the beach after all, I cant complain.

New Years Eve was a really nice evening. A lot of the restaurants and other places had a big buffet style dinners with live entertainment for the evening and it was quite expensive to get a place. Instead, we went to the markets and collected our own little picnic dinner from the stalls. This included corn on the cob, some pork sticks, fried sticky rice patties, satay chicken, spring rolls and icecream for dessert. We sat there for a little while and played my 'would you rather game' (with some really really random would you rather questions). After that we found a place that was playing live music for the whole night, set up our mat again and that is where we welcomed in the new year.

Excuse the bad photo quality but these pics are of us sitting on the mat enjoying our food and the music

Although the weekend was short it was a good one filled with lots of beach and good memories. I hope that everyone else also had a good new years eve and wishing you God's blessings for 2013!