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Published: April 20th 2010
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Last week we celebrated the Lao New Year, marked with traditions new and old. Called Pi Mai or Songkhran, this system of time is based upon the birth of Buddha, 543 years before the birth of Christ. This year is 2553. Despite being Buddhist and celebrating the Buddhist New Year, Laos keeps the Christian calendar system for most of its affairs.
In Luang Prabang, known to have the best and biggest new year’s celebrations in the country, the new year is welcomed with a week full of activities. Some of these activities are wonderful, old traditions, others are obnoxious, and others are really dangerous.
The main activity of Lao New Year is throwing water on each other, like a giant water fight, one that continues for a week. Water throwing symbolizes cleansing away the sins and dirt of the past year so one can enter a new year fresh and clean, without baggage from the past year. It sounds beautiful but generally isn’t. But it is fun. Especially since its hot here, one hundred degrees everyday.
For one entire week, each time you leave the house, you will get wet. The water throwers set up by the roadside,
in front of someone’s home, a hose flowing water in to a big bucket. They use small buckets or water guns to soak every passerbyer. It doesn’t matter if you’re on your way to work, if you have a laptop in your bag, or are holding a camera.
People consider it their Pi Mai duty to get you wet, so that you can enter the new year free and clear. Usually once a bucket of water is dumped on your head, your shoulders, or your chest, the dumper says, “Sok Dee Pi Mai”, meaning good luck, happy new year. There’s no sense begging to get by unscathed. Those throwing water take their purpose seriously. They don’t care where you’re going.
Whether you’re in a car, on a motorbike, on a bicycle or walking, you will be soaked with pails of water. People also drive around in the beds of pickup trucks, with a big bucket of water, throwing it on to passerbyers. Now this water throwing is not a solemn religious experience, at all. It is more of a big party with everyone drinking beer and playing loud Lao and American hip hop and pop music. People dance
on the sidewalks, dance in the truck beds, drink massive amounts of beer, and enjoy soaking others and being soaked. As always, the Lao are incredibly generous, and eager to share their fun with everyone. Walking down the street during Pi Mai, you’ll be soaked, but you’ll also be offered glasses of beer and invited to party and dance.
I must mention the obvious sexual freedom aspect of Pi Mai. This is usually a pretty conservative place, with traditional expectations for young men and women, no sex before marriage, no public displays of affection for anyone. Sex seems to be repressed here 361 days a year, and during Pi Mai, for 4 days, it does seem like everyone goes sex crazy. Young men are obsessed with throwing water on to the chests of young women. Girls wear skimpy clothes they would never normally wear, such as short shorts or white shirts with colored bras. I even saw a toothless old Grandma dancing wildly to some hip hop on the street one day.
Generally ex-pats living here in Luang Prabang either love Pi Mai, and head out to party each day with their cell phone and money wrapped in
Dancing lady-boy
A lao girl could never get away with wearing that in Luang Prabang. plastic bags in their pocket, or they hate Pi Mai, and schedule their annual vacation away from town during Pi Mai. Another alternative is to just stay home and not leave your home if you can’t take the full week of partying or if you need a day off. For me, it’s the best time of year.
There is a high presence of military police in town during Pi Mai, yet I didn’t witness a single incident where the police had to step in despite some crazy street-filled partying, which is a good testament to the peacefulness of this celebration. Drinking and driving is not illegal, although there are some signs discouraging it. So everyone is drinking, the people in the truck beds, the drivers of the trucks, the motorbikers, the bicyclists. The police don’t stop anyone for drinking and driving. It seems to be an expected behavior. The police are delighted when you bring them a glass of beer or a chewy piece of beef jerky.
Sadly, similarly to the new year in the US, many people die during Pi Mai. As you can imagine, throwing water in to the face of someone driving a motorbike or
car is not at all safe. Especially when that driver is probably drunk. There are rules made to keep people safe, but nobody follows these rules, and they aren’t enforced. You shouldn’t throw water at someone driving their motorbike fast, but many people do. Conversely, if you are the motorbike driver, you should slow down when passing water throwers, to ensure your own safety. Usually, the motorbikes, cars and bikes drive very slowly when passing water throwers. But sometimes they don’t, especially a lot of young drunk people.
Some kids have started some activities not in the spirit of pi mai, mixing their water with dyes: black, red, green or orange. When they throw this water on you, it dyes your hands, your face or your clothes. Other kids take greasy pots with them, pots dirty from being cooked over an open fire, and rub the black grease from the pot on to passerbyers, instead of throwing water. It stinks, its oily and it stains your clothes. You see kids coming down the road, covered in the stuff, their hands coated, and you run and hide.
Another non-traditional but less harmful addition to the game is baby powder,
flour or tapioca mix powder. Its white and people walk around with bags of the stuff, rubbing it on other people. Your face, in your ear, on your clothes. It doesn’t stain and comes right off with water. It’s just a bit annoying. Other people like to spray their water guns directly in to your eyes or ears, which is uncomfortable.
When people fill up huge buckets in their truckbeds, they ride around town in a loop, the bed of the truck filled with about twenty friends. They pump the music and drive around town splashing people. They have cases of beer and they get very drunk. As you can imagine, its pretty dangerous, all these trucks covered in drunk kids, throwing water. Everyone gets very drunk. Everywhere you go, friends will force glasses of beer on you. No is never an acceptable answer. I think I’ve mentioned this before. If you want to drink, its great, everyone is there to drink with you. If you don’t want to drink, you have to be very strong-willed, as people will really peer pressure you to drink. People buy cases of beer, twelve 1.5 L beers to a case. They drink
their beer from one glass, passed around and refilled, with ice.
And there is an unreal tolerance for loud music among the Lao. They seem able to play and enjoy their music at high decibels that hurt foreigner ears. As they play music this loud at baby parties, I would like to say Lao people make themselves hard of hearing from a young age, and thus must play their music louder to account for their deafness. But if this was true it would make them incredible lip-readers, as I know only one Lao person that shows any sign of being hard of hearing. It’s a mystery to me. Perhaps their genetics just cause them to enjoy music at a much higher sound level than do my genetics.
There are also a few very cute, very old cars, that look like they have been wired to run again just for Pi Mai, they are so old and decrepit and you’ve never seen them around town before. They are usually topless, with teens strewn all over every inch of their mass, beers everywhere, the music pumping.
But water throwing and partying are just two parts of Pi Mai; in
Part Two of this story you can read about other Pi Mai activities...
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