For those of you unfamiliar with Songkran it is the annual Thai New Year festival and while the roots of it started out with just dripping a little bit of water on your family's hands over the years it turned into a nationwide water war that could be said to have gotten a bit out of hand over time.
Not last year, because we were all forced to basically not leave our neighborhoods in 2021 but years prior to that Chiang Mai was known as the biggest water party in the nation and the entire downtown area was shut down to traffic and it was just a free-for-all for up to 10 days in a row.
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I enjoyed this for the first day or two but by day 3 I was happy that I lived out in the suburbs and participation was somewhat optional at that point. When I first moved to Chiang Mai I lived in an apartment downtown and when that was the case there was no chance of getting more than a couple blocks from your house before you were soaking wet from revelers targeting anyone that was in their quadrant. Whether or not you actually want to participate was irrelevant and the only exception to this seems to be the elderly. I even saw police officers getting targeted all day long.
There were some threats from the government this year about shutting it down entirely again like they did last year, but instead they allowed it to a certain degree but with many conditions such as no roaming with squirt-guns - which was very vague and I am not even certain if that was translated correctly. The way that I understood it was that you were allowed to have a water war outside of your own business or home, but you were not allowed to go from place to place. Obviously this would be impossible to enforce but the central government of the entire country, not just Chiang Mai, threatened that if there was a spike in Covid cases because of Songkran, that there might be a need for additional restrictions including perhaps locking the country back down again.
I guess some people took this part of it really seriously because on the one day I did go downtown I saw very little like the images of the past where it was just chaos in the streets.
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In the past loads of vehicles would drive around in loops to throw water and get water thrown at them in the process. This was illegal this year but I did see some of it happening anyway. As far as I know none of these people were busted or ticketed but it was noticeably more sedate this year. It also only carried on for a few days from my perspective because a few days later I had to go back into the city center for something work related and was wearing a rain jacket, expecting to get doused with water but there was almost no one still participating in the water war. There were a few kids here and there but nothing like the crazy 10-day party i had seen in years past.
I don't mean to rain on anyone's celebratory parade but I actually preferred this. 10 days was far too long and after a while you get tired of being soaking wet. There was one time in 2021 that about 9 days in I was riding my scooter with my laptop in my backpack and I was nearly home without getting hit and at the last minute some rogue woman over a fence sniped me with a bucket of water soaking me and my backpack. I had prepared for this as my laptop was in a water-tight bag but it still kind of made me mad.
While I realize that the only reason why it was more low-key this year was because of Covid threats from the government, I would actually prefer they keep it this way even after we move on from that fear.
This year we had 1 day of semi-mayhem followed by a couple of days of dwindling participation and then you wouldn't really see anyone participating in it. This could have a lot to do with the fact that there are almost no tourists here and the tourists were a driving force behind the reason why it went on for 10 days. I can't say for sure. I guess I was just glad to see that people were out having some fun and not going crazy with it.