This City Is About To Explode

The Songkran festival is only one day away and the city is arming itself. Everywhere little stands have popped up selling plastic buckets and squirtguns in bright colors. I hear the strains of Thai country music coming from the grounds of the Buddhist temples in my neighborhood. Gangs of kids move together on the streets at dusk and sit on the curb in front of restaurants. My bike was stolen from right in front of my apartment. Families have driven in from the country in the backs of pickup trucks- some have formed makeshift bands and play folk songs as they cruise the streets, others have simply stockpiled four days worth of food and beer along with their bedding and pets. The families show me toothless smiles as I bike by.

Traffic has reached near-parking-lot levels of congestion around the moat, much to the delight of the children who line the streets. This festival is a five day water fight that pits pedestrians against the traffic. Some well-prepared teams have drums of water in the back of their trucks so they can circle the city's moat road for hours. Other groups man the banks in teams, some pulling water from the moat, others loading guns, and a chosen few firing at dry-looking victims as they go by. My favorites are the two person teams that mount motorbikes, driver in a raincoat and rear-gunner in his underwear struggling with some unwieldy oversized super soaker.

Many people choose to simply sit on the banks of the moat and get drunk and go swimming. The motto there seems to be, if you don't have a tattoo of a tiger or a snake don't bother to take your shirt off. Some little kids climb the ruined walls of the ancient city and perform swan dives for the cheering crowds of stopped traffic. I am concerned at the quality of this moat water, which presumably is the same that I looked on when I first arrived here, plus whatever garbage, shit, or pollution has seeped into it. But hundreds of kids don't seem fazed, and it may be that we just celebrate the end of Songkran with the beginning of a time of rampant ear infections.

On the corner of the red light district, the ceremony of washing and purifying the Buddha has aptly become a wet T-shirt contest. Drunk shirtless farangs grope their escorts and brandish giant shoulder-mounted water cannons.

People have told me the two rules of Songkran are: pace yourself because you have five days to do it all, and carry your phone in a plastic bag. If I can hold myself to one out of two I'll be doing all right.