How I learned to stop worrying and love the water bombs

Well, we arrived in Bangkok safe and sound and it's been a wild last few days. Songkran did indeed begin in earnest the evening of the 12th, and it's just been getting crazier and crazier. But in the end, it isn't the drunken falang-fest, nor the massive unauthorized groping we'd feared. 99% of the people plugging the streets are Thai, and the few falang who didn't move up to Chiang Mai can't be bothered with other foreigners. The Thai are very good-natured: if you don't want to be smeared in their chalky paste stuff, or soaked with bottles of icy water, just put up your hand and smile.

In the end, we didn't do much of that, and as a result we (and especially Nazma) found ourselves in the middle of the scrum, clothes soaked and faces muddied beyond recognition (we were only missing the cucumbers over our eyes). The cheeky ones said hello before they coated our faces with goo; some looked genuinely sorry and apologised first, and then coated our faces with goo anyway, like someone was holding a gun to their heads.

The chalky paste stuff was apparently for good luck, and the saying about the water goes: the wetter you get, the happier you'll be. If these maxims hold true, we should be set for life. Here's some locals reloading their little plastic goo buckets.

All in all it was a great laugh: we spent all day doing laps up and down the main drag, watching the crowd packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, the unbelievably stupid passenger cars trying to get through the chaos (and getting muddy handprints all over their paint jobs as a result), and the shiny happy people dancing, dancing, dancing away, Thais and tourists, ladyboys and sexpats. That having been said, though, we're getting our asses to a mall tomorrow. Happy splashing!