Songkran: Cleansing for the Thai New Year

Monk ordinations are not the only time for dancing in the street. On April 13-15 Thailand celebrates Songkran, the traditional New Year. I posted a video of it a couple weeks ago, but I thought I would take the time to expand a little more on what happened during the festival and some of the meanings behind it.

A universal view of the marking of a new year is that it comes as a new beginning. Here in Thailand, part of the new beginning to show respect to the elders and wash off the bad luck from the previous year. The weekend kicked off on Thursday when the village gathered in the street and all the elders sat on chairs with everyone else facing them. A man did some call and response chanting over the microphone and soon everyone was up in a line with their buckets of water, scented with flowers, to sprinkle on the hands of the oldest in the community. Once everyone cycled through, some people began to throw their water at the crowd eliciting laughter, smiles and more water throwing. But that was just the beginning.

The next day, I was woken up at 5 in the morning with, you guessed it, blasting music. By the time I made my way out for breakfast around 7:30, some of the neighborhood kids had already started filling up barrels with water to get ready to soak everyone that rolled through the village throughout the day. That’s what’s happening in the video I posted. I later joined them and got myself a sunburn, soaking wet and a huge smile.

The next day, a friend showed up around 10 to take me to Chaiyapum. We went a way that I hadn’t been before that took us through several villages. Some of the group was sitting in the back of the pickup and the driver would always slow down for the groups on the side of the road with their own barrels of water, allowing them to soak our friends in the back. First the group of us, 5 kids and 6 adults went to the zoo. I’m not a huge fan of zoos in the first place, and the cages here were pretty small.

Afterward, we headed into the city proper and picked up some water guns and refilled the barrels in the back of the pick up. In the time that we were waiting to complete our tasks, I was already starting to hear the calls of “farang, farang!” (foreigner) and get hit with some well aimed squirts. A couple people also came up to rub powder on my face, which is reminiscent of the chalk blessings that monks used to do and similar to the color throwing of the Indian festival Holi. Shortly after, I climbed into the back of the pickup myself so we could slowly roll our way through town dousing every and getting doused ourselves. It was truly a blast; everyone had huge smiles on their faces. I was back in the village by mid afternoon and took up a bucket with the kids in the street once again.

The next day, I made my way back out to the barrels with my bucket and got a couple of good tosses in. I had also spent part of my morning talking to some of the local men and soon one of them was trying to get me to go somewhere. Now, we had been told to say yes to most things, but I was not feeling too confident about going somewhere with him by myself so I didn’t. There was lots of confused laughter and then he left. But he returned a little while later with a note in broken English asking if I wanted to “water with the oldest people in my village?” (Also on the note was “Beautiful farang. 🙂 Trust me!!”) So I decided to check it out and I ended up eating lunch with the oldest woman in the village, Yaai Tao, who is 90 years old, and making a couple of new friends.

Later, the villagers paraded the Buddha statue through town for everyone to sprinkle water on and then join in another dance party as we made our way to this pavilion with some Buddha statues there. A bunch of monks and nuns were there as well. There was more sprinkling of water on the Buddhas and chanting and then more sprinkling water on the monks’ and nuns’ hands. Afterwards, my host mom and I hurried home because Mother Nature decided that it was her turn to play with water. We made it home just before the rain started, which was a nice way to end Songkran.

(Lacking more pictures because water + camera = mai ao! [do not want!])