Thailand is a country of holidays. Here even the New Year meet more than once, but at once three. At first we celebrated the usual, European New Year. Then noted the Chinese New Year. Well, just recently, April 13, a turn of the Thai New Year came - Songkran!
Water loses both children ...
The roots of this holiday should be sought in ancient India - at least the word "Songkran" on Sanskrit means "transition", a change of seasons. Once it was an exceptionally family holiday. However, today it is noted wide and stormy. Moreover, tourists seem to be even more active than local residents. And they go to Thailand for New Year's battles from around the world.
The first day of the celebration of the Thai New Year is made to devote to the purification - dwellings, bodies and even the souls. But if the soul of Thais is determined in the morning early (by visiting the nearest temple), with the housing - even on the eve (the whole family is obliged to clean-clean the house), then the whole rest of the day joyfully gives the body cleansing. And the bodies are not their own, but absolutely strangers. Because almost the entire population and the first day, and in the second, and the third goes to the streets to pour from the head to the legs of all those who appear on the horizon - and hiking, and those on wheels.
.. and adults.
Watering with water somewhere less, somewhere else, but everywhere, even in government agencies. Moments are very funny, when tourists, embarrassed, pinch from head to the legs of the police, on duty on the street. For all roads, you can see people with water pistols and just basins. Some carry huge bodies with water reserves right in pickup bodies or even drive fire trucks.
In Songkran, it is also customary to smear all the surrounding colored clay or talc.
Oars for the second year in a row, this holiday is only the weather. It is believed that Songkran is the hottest time of the year. After all, even watered everything and all with water, as they thought in antiquity, it is necessary not only for cleansing, but also to attract rains for a good rice harvest. So, recently, rains come hard and pour even in Songkran himself.
Seit dry these days is not able to anyone.
To be honest, because of this personally, we even were even afraid to leave the house. When it rains on the street and the temperature is noticeably declining, to be also lured somehow not quite cozy. Therefore, so as not to fall victim to the aquatic battles, this year we flew into another country in the midst of the holiday, to the glorious island of Bali. But, as it turned out, they did it at all on time. Because in Indonesia we met something more busy than ordinary rains ...
Continued ...
Read the previous history of Olga here, and where it all starts - here.