Okay, so I’m only being slightly sarcastic in the title. I spent my morning and early afternoon today traveling with our driver, Surochai (who despite his limited command of English has a generally jovial sense of humor) along with two other teachers, one who is departing soon (Austin) and another of whom is fairly new (Abigail), as well as two friends of mine from the United States who now live in Bangkok and were visiting Chiang Mai for the weekend. Anyway, we were all in a truck navigating the streets of Chiang Mai from one factory to another, then to lunch and the river, and then back home after that.

The stops on the trip were quite lovely. The umbrella factory included some very beautiful paintings and some lovely work on umbrellas purchased by Abigail and Eric and Amanda, drawing a pheasant on the one and a couple of birds of paradise (it appeared) on the other. After a bit of a long set of detours we made it to a teakwood factory that was full of lovely items, many of them historical or mythological in nature, but all of which were very expensive. The best buy was a mini-bar that was $1500 but that was well out of my price range. After that we went to the Shinawatra silk factory, which was very professional in its operation and full of lovely but expensive silk products. I wanted to know if the factory was related to the famous Shinawatras, two of whom (including the current Prime Minister) have been Prime Ministers recently, but I didn’t want to be rude.

On the other hand, the local people around Chaing Mai had no problem being rude. I’m not very fond of the Songkram festival [1]. There are a few things about the way it is celebrated that bothers me. I’m not fond of being blasted with buckets of freezing cold water when I don’t have anything to attack them with myself. It’s not very sporting. I got upset seeing cars that had been vandalized with paint, including hand prints, or buckets of water being dumped on motorcyclists, which is quite dangerous. It strikes me as very odd that in this country you can get twenty years of jail simply for offending the wrong person in a text message or a speech or a blog, but vandalizing their property and attacking them with water cannons or cold water is considered all part of the fun. The people of this country have their priorities screwed up.

It appears that quite a few of the people around us felt the same way I did. Not everyone was happy being a hooligan or dealing with the water festival, although some had a great deal of fun with it. The only people I didn’t see being sprayed mercilessly were monks, as I imagine someone would lose a lot of merit for spraying the monks. The festival was even more anarchical and unpleasant than I expected, and that’s saying something. It was interesting to see in our party that the guys enjoyed it a lot less than the girls. I’m not sure why that was the case, but it’s worth pondering about for a bit.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/sons-of-anarchy/