31st December 2010
What does £24 per person (the price of three good meals in a Thai restaurant) get you for a New Year’s Eve bash at Kuraburi resort? You get a buffet dinner that includes nothing you’ll remember in a week. You get as much fruit punch and cheap beer as you can drink, but must pay £16 extra for a bottle of truly excerable generic red wine from California. You get staff that not only don’t speak English but have mastered the “vacant goldfish” expression to make it clear they really aren’t going to try very hard to understand you. You get to hear Hotel California and sundry other tunes murdered by a local guy who shouldn’t be allowed a guitar let alone an amp (cranked up way too loud for a dining room). Other
Eventually you get bored and head back to your room for a drink and some quiet reflection on the year gone by and the new one to come. All we wanted was a decent place to stay on New Year’s Eve in Khuraburi, but in a festive money-grab repeated around the world wherever tourists flock, the quality hotels all put on some kind of gala dinner and/or dance for the big night. And because all the staff will be busy filling the buffet and cajoling guests to dance, they are not interested in making exceptions and so the festivities and the inflated price are compulsory. We had the same problem when we tried to have a New Year in Scotland a couple of years back, although of course the black tie dinners were rather more than £24 a head! Thank goodness for the Glenfinnan Hotel.
Anyway, worry not dear friends. We found the dinner more comic than tragic and the early night allowed us to catch up on our blogging. Happy New Year!
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