Songkran and My Birthday!

This past week has been a lot of fun! As a mentioned in my last post the weekend of April  14^th was the Thai New Year, which is when a water festival called Songkran takes place. This is a crazy weekend! People get Friday off of work and spend the entire weekend engaged in a city wide water fight. All day people are crowding the street, using hoses, buckets, squirt guns and whatever they can find to get each other wet. One of the biggest soakers is that people gather in pickup trucks and drive around the city with barrels of ice water that they dump on people! It’s hard to explain how out of control this gets, I was not able to step more than 10 steps away from my apartment with out getting drenched. The water fight lasts all weekend and everyone in the entire city comes out for it. Children and parents a like go out and celebrate Songkran!

Songkran!

I went and joined the water festival on Saturday and Sunday and I got drenched! We drove into the epicenter of the water fight, in the middle of the Old City. We took a red taxi to get there and there was tons of traffic. When we would stop, people would come running behind our taxi and dump cold water into where we were sitting! It’s nuts but so much fun (as long as you don’t take any valuables!).

With my water gun!

Having a blast! I'm on the very right!

On Tuesday it was my 21^st birthday! I had a great day that included an hour long massage (only $8!). I also went out for dinner and drinks J with my friends to burger place! I hadn’t had Western food since we got here and to have it again was amazing! I can’t describe to you how sick of rice I am! Later that night we set off a wish lantern from our roof for my birthday. They have a huge lantern festival where they set off tons of these in Chiang Mai, but it’s in November.

Happy Birthday to me!

Setting off the lantern!

On Saturday I went to a Chiang Mai Football (soccer) Club match. They have some really dedicated fans and it was a good time, we even won! However now things are starting to slow down and the only things on my calendar are exams!  I can’t say that I will have a particularly exciting last couple weeks in Thailand… I probably will be studying for most of it! So I will end my blog here! Thank you so much for reading and I hope to see you when I return home!

Southern Islands

On the 4^th I left for the southern part of Thailand where they have beautiful tropical islands! I stayed there for 10 days.  For the first leg of my trip I travelled by myself, which went well. I took a bus, taxi truck and then boat to a beach called Ton Sai. I stayed here for 2 days. The beach was only accessible by boat and was surrounded by mountains. There were about three places to stay and 4 places to eat in the whole area. There were around 50 other people staying here! It felt like a very secluded and private beach! It was incredibly pretty with stunning sunsets. I spent time on the beach, reading and relaxing. I stayed in a bungalow that was big enough for a mattress and a bag. The only electricity was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, which only worked from 6pm – 3am. 

Ton Sai Beach

My private luxury bungalow on Ton Sai

After a relaxing couple days to myself, I took a ferry to meet two of my friends on a nearby island, Koh Phi Phi. This too was a beautiful island. I have never seen water so clear or so blue! We also stayed in a bungalow here, only it was bigger, had electricity and a bathroom!  Here we hung out at the beach a lot and explored the small town. Koh Phi Phi was larger than Ton Sai, but still a very small island.  This leg of our trip had its ups and downs though. It was a beautiful island and I had a great time. However after 2 days my one pair of shoes broke, so I went without shoes the rest of the trip! I also had to make a trip to the doctor for an infection on my hands. And the biggest hiccup was a tsunami warning.

Beach on Koh Phi Phi

The girls!

It was still sunny and beautiful outside when the sirens went off. We packed up our stuff and went down to the desk area of our bungalow site. The other travelers were there as well. We stayed there and then local Thai people from closer to the beach began to head up the mountain.  So we followed the locals up the mountain. We stayed at the very top for 4 hours. We didn’t have anything to eat so the locals fed us all dinner, which was very kind of them. We never really knew what was going on, or how much danger we were in. But sometimes someone would say it was safe to go back down, so we would begin to make our way down, and then Thai people would yell at us to turn around! Finally someone had said the tsunami watch was over and it was ok to go back. We passed a family with a TV and it said we were in the clear.

View from the top of the mountain where we stayed during the warning

 Thankfully we were safe! It was a crazy experience waiting on the top of a mountain all night, not knowing what was going on.  The next couple days we continued to enjoy the beach and eventually had to go back to Chiang Mai. But this weekend was the Songkran water festival in Chiang Mai, but I’m going to save that for my next post!

Koh Phi Phi sunset

Chiang Rai

This past weekend I went to another hill tribe with my class. This was in Chiang Rai, which is a 4 hour windy drive from Chiang Mai. Before we went to the hill tribe we stopped at the White Temple. This is a very famous temple in Thailand that was built by a famous modern artist. It’s easy to recognize because it is entirely white on the exterior, where as most temples here are gold. To my surprise there was a mural inside depicting the evil in our world (mainly the western countries), which included the twin towers, but also kung fu panda, Michael Jackson and angry birds. It was quite interesting to see how Buddhist feel about many of the aspects in our western culture.

Entrance to the White Temple

Hands from underworlds. If you put money in their hands, it is said to help bring your ancestors out of the underworld and into a higher human world in their next life.

We then went to the Akha village. We stayed with different host families, and ate with them as well. We slept in a straw hut outside their house for the night, which was very loud because of all the animals around us.  Before having dinner we played with the children of the village for a long time, which wore us out! But later we participated in a ceremony with the other women of the village. We dressed up in their traditional clothing and danced around the fire with them.

Playing with the kids.. this circle multiplied with kids every minute!

I'm on the right dressed in traditional Akha women clothing

Dancing around the fire

In the morning we ate with our host family and had another ceremony before we left. Here they tied strings on our wrist for good luck. They also gave us each a hard boiled egg to eat once we were outside the village, again for good luck.  Then we took a boat trip through the golden triangle, where Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Thailand all meet. We cruised along the Mekong river and visited each side for just a short time. Before heading home we went to the Opium Museum. This was a really well done museum about the history of Opium. Opium is not illegal in Thailand but is still a problem in the golden triangle area where it is often illegally grown.  

Map of the Golden Triangle

Boating through the Mekong River.. you can really see me but I'm there!