Songkran Pt 1: Happy Thai New Year!

Happy Thai New Year!  You've just got to love Thailand.  They celebrate the International New Year (2010, 2011, etc), the Chinese New Year (in Jan) and their own Thai New Year.  The celebration starts on the 13th of April and usually goes 3 days (not including the weekend).  It is now the year 2054 in Thailand.  I will try to do my best to describe this very special holiday, but I advise making it to Thailand one year to get the true flavor.

The month of April is considered one of the hottest of the year.  The most obvious celebration of this 3-day+ festival is the throwing of water.  People line the streets in every major and minor city and town in all of Thailand and spend hours endlessly dousing each other with water.  It seems as though the whole country shuts down and takes to the streets.  Any means possible is used: water guns, buckets, fire hoses, pumping water from lakes and rivers -- whatever it takes to get everyone and everything wet!

On a more religious level, Thais celebrate Songkran by paying visit to a wat (Buddhist monastery) to pray, donate, give food to monks and cleanse Buddha statues by pouring water over them.  It is believed that by doing this, it will bring good luck and prosperity for the New Year.

Here's Kayne and me.

Now, let's get down to the activities over the last 4 days.  Because we did so much, I think I'm going to have to break my posts down into days to really give enough depth and dimension to it all.

Wednesday, Day 1

This started with a nice early rise at 3:30am.  I was with a group of 10 others.  The idea with getting up so early was to avoid the inevitable hoards of people leaving Thailand to Chiang Mai and the countryside.  This was the first day of Songkran and many Thai families leave to tour and to visit family and friends.

The drive was a little over 3 hours.  We first visited a 100 year old market in Supan Buri.  It was a huge place where you could get anything from shirts, to water guns, to food and statues.  There were all forms of exotic foods I'd never seen or even heard.

This is sala (background) and rambutan (foreground).

We arrived in Supan Buri where we visited Baan Kwai, which means "House of Buffalo" in Thai.  The main attraction was of course the buffalo but there were other things like traditionally built Thai houses that provided a little historical background of the country.  Here are some shots of the houses and their landscape:

And obviously they had buffalo.  You could pet them, feed them and even ride them, which I took the opportunity to do.  Then they had a buffalo show where they would do tricks like lift a leg, kneel and even smile.  One even had a fifth leg coming out of his neck.

Here are some we saw.

Me with my buddy "Buffy" the buffalo.

Here are some other pictures of the buffalo show and within Baan Kwai. 

(Yes, that's a midget not a really big buffalo.)

After that we made our way to the motel in Nakorn Sawan. 

The view from around the motel. 

We got settled in, took our naps and made our way to the closest massage parlor.  Deeelightful.  A nice Thai foot massage was certainly in order and boy did it hit the spot. 

Finally, we had a dinner engagement with May's relatives at an outside restaurant. The atmosphere was great and the food was amazing.  May's cousin owns a sugarcane farm in the country, which we visited the next day.  More on that later. 

The whole gang with May's relatives.

During dinner I had the opportunity to practice and show off my Thai a little bit.  I'm actually getting quite good.  I'm hoping to be conversationally fluent in 6 months.

All in all, the first day was exhausting but one I will not forget. 

Stay tuned.  I'll be posting Day 2 tomorrow or the next day.  Until then, if you have any Thai friends or acquaintances, wish them a very Happy Thai New Year!!