Weekend

Pai (Bye)

Mostly everyone went to Pai. Pai is a backpackers/hippy kind of city. On Saturday morning I woke up at 7am to leave for Pai via chartered vans. The van ride was 3 hours of very windy roads in a very uncomfortable 12 person van with 12 people.

So, I thought that Pai was going to be an escape from the Songkron festivities e.g. water throwing. But it wasn’t. As soon as I left the huts to get lunch I was doused with water by local Thai kids. After lunch I scoped out the city drenched with water. Until I gave in and bought a monkey backpack water gun and teamed up with local Thai kids and splashed everyone passing by for what I think was 3 hours. This was the first official day of Songkron and the 2nd day was def more hard core. The 2nd day they had groups of people throwing water with music blasting in the streets and they used coloring in the water to stain the clothes you would wear.

I had my first mango with sticky rice in Thailand at the most legit market I’ve seen in Thailand. The market sold only food products e.g. food to eat, veggies, or uncooked meat. The meat looked very sketch because there were a ton of flies on them and it wasn’t refrigerated and it was very very hot.

I tried riding a bicycle to a waterfall but had to turn back because the ride uphill was too hard (I didn’t go far) but the ride back was all downhill and villages threw water along the way, so that was fun. And I ended up just taking a very very long nap on the porch.

Had my first bucket. Found 75 Baht ($2) mixed drinks.

Songkron

Got back into Chiang Mai today and it was insane. We got invited to walk in the parade with Uniserv (the hostel I am currently staying at). The parade consists of floats with Buddha images from wats found around Chiang Mai. The parade is for people to throw holy water on the Buddha images to clean the images for the New Year. In between throwing holy water the bystanders would throw holy water on me or just buckets of water till I was once again drenched.

Bangkok

I just found out this morning what was going on in Bangkok and it was crazy and everything is fine where I am, but hopefully everything will die down by the time I get to Bangkok.

Thanks for the pictures Sarah!