Happy New Year!! - again

I know the last time we talked New Year it was February and we were talking Chinese New Year. Now welcome to Thai New Year. The festival is called Songkran and the biggest symbol of the festival is water: water guns sprayed at each other, water poured gently over buddha statues to clean and bless them, watealr tossed in bucket loads from a street corner. (for a better explanation go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_New_Year). Wow - Thai people know how to throw a holiday. For one thing, it lasts 3 days which is a whole lot better than one. Which leads me to explain what I was doing hanging around the train station last night to see the Songkran blessing of the trains. I'm off for 5 days so I decided to take a train to Chiang Mai - the one remaining large Thai city that I was yet to visit. More about that later. Suffice it to say, I've been wet for 2 days and will likely be that way 2 more days. On Friday afternoon all the kids brought out their water guns and after a very solemn blessing ceremony which included traditional bongos and chimes, Thai dancers, we all got wet. It was 2 hours of uninhibited fun and my hat is off to Brad who teaches P1 and was the biggest 6 year old in the group. He brought his own super soaker from home and played water wars all afternoon. Great fun!

Later we all scattered for popular vacation spots: Hua Hin, Pattaya, and in my case, Chiang Mai. I had to sit around the train depot for a couple of hours which was cool because I got to see the blessing of the trains several times as part of the Songkran events. Then I was off on what should have been a 12 hour train ride but turned into much longer. I took the overnight sleeper train thinking I would wake up the next morning and enjoy the scenery on the last couple of hours there. I woke up to find we were behind schedule. Oh well, at least we're on the way. Then around 11:00 the train began to slow down as we started up the mountains (Chiang Mai is in the mountainous northern part of Thailand). Suddenly the train stopped and porters came through telling us to get off the train. Get off where I thought. We're in a jungle. For about an hour we stood in the edge of the jungle in the shade of a bamboo grove while workers tried feverishly to repair whatever broke (I never did understand). I was nervouse since I don't like snakes and I was wearing only flip flops and my crop pants. But the Thai perspective is why be worried, it won't fix the problem any faster. In about an hour we were on our way again and I had only a couple of bug bites around my ankles and some great pictures of a huge ladybug. Eventually we did make it to the depot in Chiang Mai and the real craziness began!