Song Kran Festival

April 15-17, 2011

When I woke up this week, my first thought was “OK, Back to work!” But then I remembered, I still have 3 days off! And this week is the Song Kran festival! This is to celebrate Thai New Year and it involves a city-wide water fight for most of the week. Water is considered cleansing and the festival began with monks lightly pouring water on elderly and respected people as blessings. The beginning of the week still starts this way, but by Wednesday, the city turns into an all out water-war zone. As you drive down the street, people fling water onto cars from the sides of the street and ride in the backs of trucks with buckets tossing water to other vehicles and to the people on the sides of the road. Some people fill up their buckets with huge blocks of ice to turn the water into freezing ice water and fling it on you. That is shocking when you get doused with glacier water while it’s 80+ degrees outside!

Since we were at the houseboats until Thursday, we went to “play Song Kran” on Friday. The place to be for this is the moat around the old city wall. We (Jaz, Sacha, Kelly, Rachel and I) took the truck, with squirt guns and buckets in tow and headed for the wall. We started at Gad Suan Kgaew shopping center, where they had shut down the street to traffic and it was just a mass of humanity walking around spraying perfect strangers with water. The closest experience I can compare it to is New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas. Just a joyous feeling in the air, lots of food vendors out, and, of course, squirt gun salesmen! Plus, they sell these great waterproof bags to put your money or phone or cameras in. They are seet-through, so you can still take pictures through them, it just give the photos a cool filter tint!

Along Gad Suan Kgaew were a string of stages where live music was being performed. On the moat side, there was even a huge foam machine pouring out on the audience so it was like a big bubble bath. It looked so fun! We walked along one whole side of the moat, got some food, took a ton of pictures, and just had loads of fun being in a water fight with an entire city. It was so great to see whole families riding in the back of a truck, little kids getting in on the action, even monks were squirting people from a truck! You are not supposed to touch monks because they have this whole cleansing ritual they have to do if they touch a woman, so I was asking Sacha whether it’s against the rules to squirt a monk, when one squirt me right in the head! I figured, hey, he fired first, there are no rules in war! So we all squirted the monks as they fought back. It was so funny, and such a surreal moment, these proper guys in their shaved heads and orange tunics just pounding us with water. Only in Thailand, eh? 

Song Kran happens at the height of the hot season, so when we arrived at about 3pm, it was the peak of the heat of the day, so getting ice cold water poured on us actually felt awesome. It also soothed my sunburn under my tank top, so I didn’t mind it much. However, about 6pm, Sacha and I were starting to be over the whole scene, especially since the sun was starting to set and it was cooling off. By that point, my tank top was so plastered to my skin that the addition of ice cold water was actually hurting, so we decided to head back, while Jaz, Rachel and Kelly continued on through the Old City to the Thapae Gate, where there was a HUGE party raging with a bunch of their other friends. We came back to pick them up at about 8, and they had tales of greatness to tell. There are some great videos and pics that Jaz took that were super funny. 

Saturday I did a whole lot of nothing most of the day. Ruth had promised to teach me to ride a motorbike and she also wanted to go try out a Unanese restaurant, but she forgot about the restaurant and made plans with another friend to get dinner. But, she still gave me a driving lesson! She has the kind of motorbike with a kickstart engine, instead of automatic, so I got to practice that. It isn’t too hard, but she said in the cooler months, it can take up to 10 minutes to start it! Her bike is also a manual, so I wanted to try driving it since those types of bikes are cheaper than automatics. I figure that since I know how to drive a stick-shift car, I should be fine.

So, we go to the Chiang Mai campus and find a deserted road to practice on. First, Ruth shows me all the different parts and what they do. It’s pretty much like riding a ten speed bike, only you shift with your feet and there’s only one hand brake instead of two. Ruth has me drive up and down the road, practicing shifting and then practice turning. I pick it up pretty quickly, since I know how to ride a bike and can feel when I should shift. I’m not that great at turns, though. I always feel like if I turn too sharply, I’m going to lose my balance and crash and if I don’t turn sharply enough, I’ll crash into another vehicle! Well, apparently Ruth thinks I’m doing well enough that I need to try driving with another person on the back.

I’m like “OK, this is where I am freaked out by the awesome responsibility of having another person’s life in my hands, when I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!” She’s like “Eh, you’ll be fine.” Thanks for the confidence. When she first gets on, I’m holding up the bike and she starts shifting around, all fidgety, to show me what some people are like as a passenger. I’m struggling to hold it up, yelling “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??!!!” as the bike nearly falls. This is my lesson in keeping control of a bike with my hips, not my hands. OK, lesson learned. But still. WHY would you do that?!?!

Next up, she wants me to drive in traffic. I think this is an ill-fated idea, but she insists. We drive to the end of the deserted street to where the main road through campus is. During this short stretch, Ruth informs me that she is not even holding on. OK, that freaks me out even more. Bad enough that I have your life in my hands, on a vehicle that has NO protective gear around us and a helmet that will probably protect our heads, but not the rest of our bodies in the event of a crash, and now you inform me that you AREN’T HOLDING ON?! What is WRONG with you?! Anyway, I start to turn right, and freak out because I can feel myself not turning sharply enough, yet still losing my balance and I’m like “Augh!! I’m crashing!!” But, I recover and we’re fine. Ruth is like “Uh, what happened there?” I explain my whole sharp turn versus balance thing, and by this point, we’re at the roundabout, so we turn left, which is much easier than turning right. I practice shifting gears, and do a U-turn at the end of a median to go back through campus. I practice going over speed bumps, stopping and turning.

At one stop and turn, I turn left way too wide, and yell “Augh!! I’m in the right lane! I’m in the right lane!” to which Ruth calmly responds “So get in the left lane.” Did I mention they drive on the left side of the road here? Yeah, that takes some getting used to. We find a little parking lot with an island that I can drive around so Ruth can show me how to come to a sudden stop. She wants me to practice using both hand and foot brakes. My fear is that I’ll use them both, come to a sudden stop, and go flying over the handlebars! Luckily, that doesn’t happen. We circle a couple times with Ruth showing me how to come to sudden stop, then she has me practice alone, and then with her as an extra person. Again, scary. Life in my hands and all that. It’s fine though, no disasters or crashes. Whew. Ruth asks if I want to drive home on the HUGE highway that we live on, with people flying past at 70km an hour. Nope. I have no desire to do that. So, she drives home. All in all, a pretty good lesson. I think I have a passable understanding of the mechanics of driving a motorbike, even on with gears and a kick start. Not bad for only and hour and a half!

Sunday, Jaz ended up sleeping in, Ruth decided to go to her Thai church, Inna had a flat tire and I didn’t have Kelly’s number, so I couldn’t get a ride to church. L Sad times. I read instead, and then went to lunch with Jaz and Nu’D, her friend from Bangkok who is very sweet. A big group of us went to Kelly’s for sangria, salsa and chips and swimming. Fun! Of course, after we spent half an hour plastering on the sunscreen, we got to the pool and it started raining about 30 minutes after we got there! We swam in the rain for a bit, but then it started pouring and even that was nice. But, then we saw a huge bolt of lightening and this amazing, loud crack of thunder, and you never saw 6 people get out of a pool so fast! This group was Jaz, Inna, Sacha, Kelly B (who lives there), Kelly C (who I just met), Nu’D and me. We ended up just chatting and drinking sangria for a couple hours til we got hungry.

After some debate about where to go for dinner, we decided on Jerusalem Falafel because the lady who runs it is from Jerusalem, which just so happens to have the best falafel I have ever eaten. So, we trooped out, all but Kelly C. who was feeling ill. Ruth was also sick, so she didn’t come out either. Dane and Ben ended up meeting us there though, so it was a nice group. Good conversation and good food, right next to the pretty part of the moat at Thapae Gate.

At dinner, Dane decided we should have a bonfire and roast marshmallows, so Sacha dropped the rest of us at Kelly’s, went to the store and got some supplies. We fired up the fire pit in the backyard (hardly a bonfire, but sufficient for s’mores!) and had a nice old campfire time. We even got Anthony and Jono (new to me, but just leaving Thailand) to come over too. Ruth was feeling a little better, so she joined us for a while too. Back to work tomorrow. I’m excited!