Festivities

We both saw the advertisement for a two-day festival featuring reggae, ska, and international DJs playing house and trance.  We both thought it might be fun to go.  Sophie looked up the website, sent an email and soon enough we had an appointment to meet the boss along with the tantalizing promise of an opportunity to work eight hours for a couple of free passes to the festival, along with some food and drinks.  So we met Joe at a bar and he bought us a beer.  He seemed smooth in a way that made me suspicious, but then again the man organizes and promotes trance festivals, recruiting artists and making sure local law enforcement doesn’t enforce drug laws.  You can’t do that for a living and not sound a little bit slick.    

The set up process was a bit of a mess.  We were constantly running out of supplies like staples and rope then making due with whatever we found lying around.  The crew was the not-unexpected collection of international riff-raff , most of whom hadn’t seen their homeland in years, each with a set of skills applicable to the task at hand; the French bar-fighter handled security, the Russian tea-maker set up tents.  Sophie and I hung decorations and dug holes.  By the time we completed the first day’s work it looked passable.  By the time 3am rolled around, with at least 2000 guests reveling in a frenzy of lasers and strobes, twisting and bouncing along with some really rather excellent music, we felt an unwarranted pride, as if we had done it all ourselves, proud of the successful festival we had managed to pull off.    We woke up the next morning, had a couple of screwdrivers, slept half the day away in the chill-out lounge we were particularly proud of building, and proceeded to do the whole thing again.

After a day of rest we headed into Chiang Mai for the first day of Songkran, a festival not unlike Holi, but from my perspective a bit crazier.  All I knew about it before was that people throw water.  I was not truly prepared for the madness of every single person in town carrying buckets, beers, and water guns, driving around in pickups with barrels of ice-water, often with menthol additives for additional coldness, intent on soaking absolutely everyone in sight.  I rode to town hanging from the back of a packed pickup-taxi and was drenched by the time we were in sight of the real action; a moat-like canal that surrounds the center of Chiang Mai.  The moat was lined on both sides by thousands of locals and tourists and water was flying everywhere.   We grabbed a couple of buckets, complete with attached ropes, tossed them into the canal for ammo, and started throwing water.  That didn’t stop for six hours, but after a long weekend of very little sleep we weren’t really up for another sunrise.   We surrendered to the ice-water induced cold around 6pm and headed home for showers and beers.