Songkran

How do I describe Songkran to you all?  As I've said many times, words simply cannot do it justice, but I'm going to try my best.

I want you to imagine the neighborhood you live in.  Cities in Thailand are large and spread out, and the rest is countryside, so isolate your neighborhood.  Now imagine, people and vendors lining the street holding and selling buckets and every kind of squirt gun ever to exist.  Your neighbors have buckets of water ready to throw on you, some of it melted ice, and some of it from the nearby moat that surrounds your city (just go with it).  Every pickup truck in your neighborhood is crowding the street, with kids ready to throw ice cold water on your in the blazing heat.

That is what greeted us in Chiang Mai.  Chiang Mai is known as the cultural hub of northern Thailand.  It's a cool city that has the corners of the old walls that used to surround the inner city still standing.  The moat is still in tact with a couple of bridges to make it more car friendly.  Adorable (and good) western restaurants are everywhere, including a very good Mexican place called Miguel's.  I ate there 3 times, NBD.

We arrived in Chiang Mai at night on Monday.  It was a looonnnngggggg journey from Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai and we were definitely ready for bed time by the end of it.  Tuesday proved to be a pre-Songkran day.  Little did we know that Thais don't hold to the Wednesday-Friday dates of Songkran.  They drench passersby for a full week.

A fellow exchange student and I rented bikes to see the whole city.  We were sopping wet the entire day, but got to see all of the inner city and a lot of the boundary areas too.  Bicycles are a great way to see the city.  Definitely my favorite mode of explorative transportation.

Wednesday was way too chilly to throw water on people, so instead I had time to get some much needed homework done.  Who knew my last three weeks in Bangkok were going to be so busy?!

Thursday proved my only full day of Songkran-ing.  After throwing water on people for 3 hours (and having water thrown on me) I called it a day and hid in our guesthouse until 8:30/9 pm when the splashing ended.  This happened every day by the way, staying inside until 8:30 or 9 to avoid the downpour.

Friday a few of us took a cooking class.  This was very cool.  I got to learn how to make two of my favorite Thai dishes: Tom Yum Kung--a soup--and Pad See Ew--a rice noodle dish.  Our instructor was very funny and able to spice up the class, literally, Thai food is spicy.  In his words, "No pain, no gain."

I also learned a lot of cool things about food.  Apparently when you turn a pineapple upside down and attempt to twist the stem it's ready to go if it turns easily.  Also, in order to make coconut cream, you have to grind up that white part and squeeze the grinds.  Cool.

We left early Saturday morning and came back to Bangkok solely to do schoolwork.  It'll be an intense two weeks of classes packed with two presentations, an in-class test, and two large research papers.  One of my ADPi sorority sisters will be visiting this Thursday and at the end of the month a fellow USC exchange student and I will be going back to Chiang Mai to play with elephants for a full day!

My last three weeks in Bangkok are jam packed and I can't believe I'm coming to the end.  I have five weeks left abroad but two of those I'll be traveling, so really, my time in Bangkok is almost over.  When I talked to exchange students from last semester they said they would love to go home for a few weeks and then come right back.  I now know exactly what they meant.