Sabai Dee Bpee Mai!! Or Happy New Year–again 🙂

Last week was the Thai New Year holiday, and yup, I guess it’s always “New Years” for someone, somewhere on our exciting planet.

Of all the New Year celebrations we’ve had the privilege to experience, we think the Thai New Year takes the cake. They do it all–parties, parades, fire works, drinking, dancing until the wee hours of the morning and then add a nationwide 3 day water fight on top!

Traditionally, Songkran was a 4 day ceremony dedicated to prayers for the new year, a visit to the temples, merit making and paying respects to the elderly.

There were traditional parades and festivals with water being thrown, but it certainly wasn’t what we associate Songkran with nowadays.

When I was younger, my parents, encouraged my siblings and I to respect Thai traditions. Though we weren’t Buddhists, we would visit the old folk’s home and ask for their blessing and we would give them much needed gifts like blankets or a treat like a movie with our projector and desserts.

The traditional way to ask for a blessing and show respects to the elders is to kneel beside them (it is important for the younger one’s head to be below the elder as a show of respect) and pour a small amount of scented water over their hands. They would then give a small blessing by splashing a small amount of of scented water over your head or shoulders.

But the water blessing has taken over and morphed into a fun and crazy holiday! Now Songkran is synonymous with raucous and extravagant water fights–which I must admit is really good fun. 😀

This is our last Songkran in Thailand for awhile and while we spent most of time staying at home and packing for our upcoming motorbike trip around the world, we did get out and join the biggest water fight/music festival organized by Pepsi called #PepsiS2O

Our good friend and client, Bassim, gave us some VIP tickets so we thought why not enjoy our last Songkran and party it out with a BANG!

Fun Fact: these wrist bands were chipped. We topped them up with credit and we could buy our food and drinks with just a scan of our wrist bands. We were quite impressed

Here are some pics and a video showing the fabulous stage they set up for the festival.

 

Little Shameless plug for Pepsi 😀

Stefan ordered a Bacardi and Pepsi…he was expecting a glass NOT a bucket…LOL!

Sorry for the mad filming…I guess we have some ways to learn 😛

While we were still dry…

Happy and Wet!! As VIPs we could have stayed in the “dry zone” but getting wet just seemed to look like so much fun!

For those of you reading this in Thailand…we hope you had a wonderful Songkran too! 😉