Songkran

Songkran is the Thai traditional new year, celebrated over three days from April 13-15, although in some cities, celebrations continue much later into April. Water has always held a special significance in Thai culture, and the main Songkran tradition is the use of water to wash away the sins and bad luck of the previous year. The water is splashed on friends, family, and neighbors, as well as used to wash statues of the Buddha and symbolically wash the hands of elders. Devout Buddhists will go to the temple at least one of the days to make merit, and Buddha statues are brought out to be washed at temples, markets, and shopping malls in the week before the holiday. People also walk around with a wet powder mixture to apply to others' faces in another form of blessing.
The powdery aftermath of my morning run

In recent decades, the celebratory aspect has steadily grown, with the water buckets being mostly replaced by water guns and hoses. People wait by the side of the road to splash cars, motorcyclists, and pedestrians as they go past, ride in truck beds with tubs to retaliate, and they take their water guns to the local walking street or a main thoroughfare that has been closed off for celebration. In the new tradition, public drinking, loud music, and neon flower printed shirts show off the celebratory atmosphere. Foreign tourists flock to Bangkok, even as much of Bangkok's population goes home to visit their family in the provinces. The dark side of this tradition is that already high traffic fatalities spike during the week of Songkran, despite pushes by the government to raise awareness.


And some people show up in straight up costumes
This year, after the passing of the late King Rama IX, there were some rumors that celebrations would be cancelled entirely. In fact, in the week before the holiday, the government was signalling that celebrations would not be allowed at Khaosan Road, Bangkok's main walking street and most popular Songkran tourist destination. By the time the holiday came, pragmatism won out - on the 13th, military police checkpoints guarded the road to keep the revelers safe, not keep them out. Some analysts have suggested that the government will often float controversial policy ideas such as this and walk them back if the opposition is too strong. In the end, all the normal locations in Bangkok were allowed to celebrate, although they were supposed to forgo alcohol sales and loud music. In provinces outside of Bangkok, celebrations were considerably less toned down.

Despite the government's go-ahead and heavy presence, the atmosphere at Khaosan generally flaunted noncompliance, with people hawking beer and every bar with a sound system making full use of it. In fact, of the three locations I visited, Khaosan had the most people with powder, despite having forbidden its use for several years due to complaints from foreign tourists. Although I didn't go to check it out myself, celebration was apparently suspended on the third day of Songkran. Although the party atmosphere was a lot of fun, and probably closer to what is now the normal Songkran experience, shutting it down was probably the right thing to do in terms of following cultural norms about the monarchy.

I went to Khaosan on the first day, April 13, with my host dad Geng, Indira from Brazil, and Liam from Canada. While there, we got split up in what was by far the densest crowd of anywhere I went, and I ended up meeting a Chinese tourist who features in my video. On the way home, we took a tuk-tuk, and were just starting to dry off when we went through a neighborhood with a lot of splashing, and had a brief tuk-tuk vs. tuk-tuk water fight with a group of tourists driving the same way. The day was exhausting, but a great taste of the culture.



On the second day, Indira and I visited Silom Road, which is one of the most popular Songkran destinations for Thai people, with fewer tourists. Indira hasn't featured in this blog too much because for a lot of the year we didn't get along too well, but I'm happy to say that once we stopped seeing each other every day and got out to do some fun things like Songkran, we got a lot closer. Much of the blocked off length of Silom is shaded due to the tall buildings and BTS line above, so at times I actually got a bit chilly. Silom businesses followed the government restrictions pretty diligently, and although the celebration was more subdued, it was still a lot of fun. My only complaint was that water refills were significantly more expensive at Silom than anywhere else. Since I took extensive video at each location, I'm going to try to let that speak for itself, but I have only edited Khaosan at this point. I will update with Silom and Siam square soon.

[video coming]

On the third day, we didn't originally have plans to go anywhere, but around noon, Camille from France came through to go to the other big celebration, Siam Square, with us. I've spent a fair amount of time at Siam, which is Bangkok's premier shopping mall district, and other than the Lamborghinis and McLarens on display at Siam Paragon, I don't have a particularly high opinion of the place. There is also a nice art gallery attached by skywalk to the complex, but it isn't affiliated with the malls, so I don't like to think of it as the same place. However, the Songkran celebration was by far the best of any I went to. They offered live music on several stages, free water refills, and a firetruck spraying the crowd at one intersection, a mainstay of Silom that was absent this year. The celebration was also nearly completely alcohol free, but the energy of the people was closer to the level of Khaosan than Silom. At one point, there was even a parade of drummers and dancers in traditional dress, and a Buddha atop a truck to be collectively washed.


This is the end of the original post.
On a side note, some people may watch these videos and think "hmm, these aren't very good." Maybe I'm selling myself short, but I would agree. So why do I make them? I took the raw footage so I would have something to remember Songkran by - and the edits serve two purposes. Now all my highlights are in one place, so I don't have to look through ten minute long videos to find the fun bits, but I'm also teaching myself video and audio editing techniques by making these. The title design is the result of my first experiments with the motion tracking capabilities of my compositing software (the free version of HitFilm if anyone is interested). That's about all there was with real experimentation on Khaosan, but I also tried working with a new window arrangement that ended up being a lot more convenient than what I did before. Siam is more interesting. There was a band playing uptempo luk thung music that we could sort of hear everywhere, but it doesn't cut through the crowd noise at all in the video, unlike the music at Khaosan. What I ended up doing to make the beginning less boring is whipping up my own luk thung beat. It's pretty bad so I ducked it under the crowd noise (and if you listen closely with headphones you won't be able to unhear that), but adding an actual melody would've made it pretty listenable. The slow motion shot uses a low-pass filter fading in and out, along with a synth being pitch bent to accent that sound effect with some sub bass. Weirdly enough, the addition of sound effects manages to draw attention to the slow downs and make them less silly at the same time. The time warping is itself another experimentation. The last thing I did is some EQ adjustments to the parade audio so that the cymbals and drum get elevated above the crowd noise. One more thing I should have done at that point is lowered the master volume a little bit so it's not louder than everything else, but at the same time, the parade was loud in real life. I hope that was interesting to anyone who read this far, and if you're interested in video and audio editing and want to share some tips or find out more about what I do, feel free to let me know.

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