So, it's not so strange, but Songkran, a holiday where we just throw water on one another constantly, is quite fun. In the mornings, we would go to the temple and tam boon, or make merit. To make merit is to do things to improve your karma. You may offer food to the monks or visit sick people or any other variety of activities that are essentially just nice things to do for people. We went to offer food to the monks. What goes down is this: first, we go to pray in front of the statue of the Buddha and stick some incense in a bowl in front of the statue. Then, the monks come in and say some prayers. We offer them the food and wait for them to finish eating. They say some more prayers and then we take the food that they didn't finish eating back for ourselves. There is always a ton of food because there may be only a few monks but many people coming to pray have brought two or three dishes each. And before you get grossed out by the fact that we're eating other people's leftovers, keep in mind that Thais eat communally so they would just take a spoonful of food and put it over their rice.

On Wednesday, after we finished doing this, we went to my co-teacher's dead husband's father's house, where we helped prepare food to offer again to more monks. We ate. And ate. And ate some more. Then, we asked his parents for blessings by washing their hands. From there, we went to her mother's house to repeat the same hand-washing ritual.

After all the eating and washing, I was pretty tired and just wanted to come home and rest, but my host family was going to a wat, so I decided to go. We watched a bunch of drunks dance around. Two guys came up to me and powdered my face and then we went into the wat to say some more prayers. After, everyone lined up to bless the monks. So, we put a little water onto their hands. Then, we got to play with the water ourselves. We threw it at one another, and I got soaked. When we got home, my two little sisters and my brother, who's my age, had a water fight. Pretty awesome. I don't know if it's just my family or what, though, because their idea of a water fight was each person takes a turn to go over to the other side and splash them with water. Seems a little too orderly to be called a “fight”, but “tomato, tomatoh”, I suppose.

Later that night, my co-teacher's daughter heard about the two guys powdering me at the temple and got pretty upset, saying that I shouldn't let them do that to me. I know people get all up in arms about drunks, but I just find it amusing most of the time. I never really felt like I was threatened. I think that they feel like all of this “harassment” (and I use that term very lightly) is new to me, but honestly, there are just as many, if not more, creeps in the states that like to be, well, creepy.