So it Begins
Mobile Phone in a Ziplock Bag, Squirt Guns at the Ready, or, "Today the Lord of the Songkran Comes Down From the Heaven"

Start the Riot: Two nights ago, the other volunteers and I had our own rip-roaring start to Songkran, Thailand's traditional New Year's celebration (really a week of drunken revelry, cancelled classes, water splashing, and Buddhist reverence).

The evening started as nights of revelry often do: at the local bar.

I was discussing Wittgenstein over a game of Backgammon when the local constable arrived. He was looking for a man with one eye who'd last been seen in the vicinity of the gem market...

Oh wait, no, I was trying to convince everyone that we should go to the carnival and ride the bumper cars. Dave had gotten everyone to dress in their finest, so plentiful were the shirts and ties and evening dresses. These were the perfect costumes for bumper car bumping.

This Thai carnival was more fun than the Vietnamese carnival I went to, though the drag queens flushing rodents from baskets and banging on tamborines as part of a carnival game were surprisingly nowhere to be found. And also surprising, the Thai carnival was more militarized than the Vietnamese (which had no officers at all). One of the more senior fellows in our border club explained the need for so many uniforms: "these carnivals always end in a riot." Our night didn't end in a riot, but it was interrupted by a power cut.

After the bumper cars, we went to our town's only nightclub, a place unfortunately named after that big computer glitch non-even of the turn of the pseudo-millenium. (Funny, the spell out the two letters and one number in Thai script as they're pronounced).

The nightclub featured scantilly clad Thai rockstars and happy hardcore. Nights at this place also usually end in rioting, so the other foreigners say. It was my first and probably last night there. Our last few moments there ended with popcorn, trying to figure out why the power cut, Hong Kong action films, seeing a dude get glass in the eye frmo a bar fight, and dancing and singing in the streets. I spent the next day recovering. Then Songkran really began....

Two of My Friends Become Monks: Yesterday I danced at the opening morning party of Songkran. Why sit back (how could I?) when the glittering host of the morning Songkan kick-start drags you to the dusty center of the tent and takes your hand like Laxmi waltzing Vishnu to the sound of drums and steel bells? Sure I had to turn down the chicken curry, but it was just a short dozen-truck caravan ride (stopping at the road anywhere kids with buckets or old women with garden hoses stood smiling ready to douse) and then we were at the temple I teach at sitting before 20 curries prepared by the whole of my town's Buddhist community. As I chatted with one of my students, the ceremonies began.

This was a very important day. One of my housemates and two of my other local associates were donning orange robes and saying their head-shaven vows for the week of Songkran. The temple was welcoming 20 new 8-day students.

After spending the afternoon in Dhamma conversation, meditation and ice cream eating, I walked home with my squirt gun, provoking massive retaliation attacks anywhere I could just to fight back the heat.

And so Songkran continues. Yesterday Dave and I doused our students from the balconies of our house. Today the victims surely lie in wait, looking to retaliate for yesterday's guerrilla water gun and bucket attacks.

Dry for now,
~joshua