The larger bummer here is that Songkran is kind of a neat holiday, one you probably couldn't have in America. But now it's been sexualized, which is kind of disappointing.
Songkran is a new year's festival, but it's also probably the largest surviving instance of sympathetic magic. It comes at the end of the dry season and the beginning of the wet season. So just as water is becoming scarcest you throw it around everywhere, as if there was a lot of it to be had, and that brings more of it, ending the dry and bringing the rains.
The celebration is essentially a nation-wide, all-day waterfight.
I was there in 1994 and anyone could throw water on you at any time, just for fun. My wife and I were standing with some friends on the sidewalk when a bus drove by. Unbeknownst to us be had a five gallon buck of water between his feet and a salad bowl to scoop up water with and we got a bowlful as he passed by. It was this way all day long – kids, clerks, passersby. It was neat to have an excuse to have fun with strangers, kind of like Halloween.
But now it's about sexiness. Rats.
learns to drill with a screwdriver.
