Showing posts with label Songkran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Songkran. Show all posts

April 13 - Pi Mai - Lao New Year

Posted on April 13, 2020



This year is not a good year to do normal celebrations. Darn it.

The global pandemic ruined Passover seders and Easter dinners, and it is also ruining Songkran in Thailand (see below) and Pi Mai in Laos - the new year celebrations in these Southeastern Asian nations.

Actually, I read that the celebrations will be postponed, not necessarily cancelled. Here's hoping.

Anyway, here's what the people of Laos will be missing today:







April 13 – Songkran in Thailand

Posted on April 13, 2015

Today starts a 3-day water fight in Thailand!

It's all about celebrating the Thai New Year, and like New Year's celebrations in Laos and Cambodia, tradition calls for a giant country-wide, multi-day water sprinkle, squirt, slosh, and gush. 

Whether it is water shooting out from water pistols or elephant trunks, from hoses or buckets – it's water, water everywhere.


Here's something that has never
happened to me, not even once,
when I was walking around cities
in Southern California!
See, I've never walked down the street, here in Southern California, and gotten sprayed by a stranger with a water gun. No matter how hot it gets, no stranger has ever turned a hose on me or sloshed an entire bucket of water on my car. (For one thing, we're in a drought, and we have no water to waste!)





But during Songkran in Thailand, you can expect strangers to do exactly that:

...shoot you with a water gun...


...spray you with a hose...


...or slosh you with a bucket.



All this water play grew out of the tradition of water pouring, symbolically washing away sins. Many people still do the more respectful pouring-of-water onto the bottom of a statue of Buddha or over their teachers' hands.

And then they go out and do this:







Also on this date:




















Plan ahead:

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