Songkran

Songkran, as anyone with access to Wikipedia knows, is the Thai New Year, which happens to be celebrated over my birthday.  To have a successful Songkran, as far as I can tell, you need to do the following:

1. Get the biggest containers (trash cans, rain barrels, etc.) you can find and put them in the back of your pickup truck.  Don’t worry if you don’t have a pickup truck, one of your friends will have one.  (See step 4)
2. Fill them with water, preferably cold (even though it won’t stay that way for long).  NB: If you can’t find any suitable containers, line the bed of your truck with plastic and fill the entire thing about half full with water.
3. Put on something bright and flowery and/or something that you don’t mind getting soaked and don’t mind wearing when soaked, e.g. something that won’t become see through when wet.
4. Get 10-15 or so of your closest friends and pile them into the back of the truck.
5. Give them small buckets or plastic scoopy-things and/or super-soaker water guns.
6. Crank up the jams!
7. Drive around town throwing water at/on anyone who crosses your path. 
8.  Enjoy the reciprocation of said water-throwing from other celebrants in trucks, shopkeepers and their children at the side of the road (who have also filled up barrels with water, sometimes icy cold), tourists. 
9. Optional addition: mix up a liquidy paste of water and talcum powder (add coloring if desired) and gently smear this on people’s cheeks as you walk by them.

If you happen to be in a big city (such as Khon Kaen, where I spent the holiday with my host parents) there may be a larger, organized festival, such as a pedestrian zone with competing stages featuring performers hired by the festival sponsors like Big Cola, and DTAC.  These stages will each have a wall of speakers which will be blasting the performance at bone-shaking decibels, and they will only be 10-15 yards or so apart, so the entire length of the pedestrian zone will be one gigantic multistage concert.  Add to this that the performances will include people on stage with water sprayers such as I imagine might be used to spray a garden a few acres in size dousing the assembled audience, and that as people mill from one to the next they will also spray and pour water and smear the talc mixture on one another.  No description really does it justice, so you will just have to come to Thailand and experience it for yourself!