Songkran - Water Activity

In Thailand the people are currently celebrating their traditional New Year or "Songkran" which runs from the 13th - 15th April!  They celebrate by throwing water at each other... Awesome!

One of the very interesting things about "culture" is that it is always evolving... our identity and our cultural traits may be steeped in our collective ethnic or social heritage but 'culture(s)' are not stagnant!  In highschool I was asked to define Australian culture and I was totally flummoxed... I remember feeling like I understood my own culture but actually articulating it was a challenge.  As a result I swung wildly from paraphrasing syllabus from my Australian history class to grunge music and meat pies (think 1990's people!!).  Needless to say Mr McCarthy had a good giggle that day!

I am personally fascinated by why and how cultures evolve.  Think about Bali where arguably the tourist dollar has kept traditional Balinese art forms current and extremely relevant, and in contrast Cambodia where art, music, dance and religion was all but wiped out by the burtal regime of the Khmer Rouge but where today these traditional art forms are experiencing a strong revival as a national looks to re-establish itself.

In the case of Thailand, "SongKran" is more traditionally a time for Buddhist Thai's to visit their Wats and pay respect to their elders.  Families will pour water on Buda images from their homes to clean and purify them.  It is believed that this will bring them luck and prosperity for the coming year.  Over time this evolved into what can only be described as a national water fight of epic proportions whereby Thai people take to the streets with buckets and water pistols and drench whomever they find.  I LOVE it!

We paid homage to the Thai new year with vastly less energetic but equally WET activity.   I drilled holes (using a hot skewer) into a 2 liter milk bottle, strung it up with some string, twisted the string around and around, then poured water in and let it spin.

For such a simple idea it was very effective and it made one little girl in particular very happy!




Suk san wan songkran... Happy Songkran everyone!