Water fights, broken arms and the like…

It’s been a while since I’ve written…I thought life was normal, but I learned my lesson that I should never blog about that!  Shortly afterwards, Adrianne broke her arm while on a RipStik, while we were at a friends house for dinner.  Nothing like making friends by going to the ER with them! 🙂  She is faring well, but the sad news is that it is finally turning hot here, and this week is the week of Song Kron, the Thai New Year, where Chiang Mai hosts the largest water fight in the world.

I am the drowned rat in this picture…pretty much, everyone is fair game during these three days anywhere…the funnest place to be is around the “moat” where there really is a square and people drive around throwing water everywhere…the really vicious people (namely, us) buy ice make the water that you hurl at people ice cold…when you run out of your “clean” water from your hose at home, you just fill up with moat water.  At one point, my friend saw a guppy inside the bucket she was throwing on someone…Nice!

What made yesterday so crazy was that this is usually during the HOT and DRY season, something that has been rather elusive this year.  It was FREEZING yesterday…hypothermia was actually setting in…my two pinkies were totally numb.  It was super fun, though…the kids all bailed and all of the adults were out acting like teenagers!  Reflecting now, I mark yesterday as the “Day I fell in love with Thailand”.  It was the perfect day (until all of us got home and everyone was exhausted and whiny)…it was my first time being here where I interacted with the Thai’s and it wasn’t about getting something DONE.  (You have all heard my whining about that).  There were no expectations, except to throw water on each other…and boy, did we do that right!  It was ridiculous…you’d throw ice cold water (like straight in the face of people daring to ride a moped) and they were look mad for an instant and then break out in hilarious laughter!  The idea behind Song Kron is that it’s so hot that people are getting “irritable” and have “hot hearts”, so the water is meant to just make everyone “chill out”.

As I write, the kids and another set of friends are out again (they are braving up to it because the sun is actually shining!)…Adrianne has her arm all plastic bagged up and I’m catching up on blogging.  So, HAPPY NEW YEAR from Thailand.  Next year, plan on joining! (There are no sanitary promises on the moat water!)