Thais celebrate water festival

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Thais celebrate water festival

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Thais and tourists celebrated the water festival on Tuesday in Bangkok a day before Thai New Year.

12 April,2011 11:05 pm

Thais and tourists celebrated the water festival on Tuesday in Bangkok a day before Thai New Year started as few hundreds of revellers started to douse passersby and get them as wet as possible.The street of Khao Sarn, a well-known area for foreign backpackers, was turned to water battlefield ahead of Thai New Year “Songkran”, a week-long of “big splash” festival.The revellers shouted “Happy New Year” and started to shoot the others with their colourful water pistols. It was not only Thais who celebrated the festival but the foreign tourists immerse themselves fully in this cultural event.In Thailand, “Songkran” means “entering the new year,” and people often take a long holiday to enjoy themselves in the annual water festival.The festival on Khao Sarn Road was quiet last yeat but it became more lively again after last year deadly clash in April and May between the red-shirted protesters and the military which killed 91 people, wounded more than 1,800 people.The festival usually falls on April 13 to 15 but many people also started one day earlier.The festival generally falls at the hottest time of the year, just as the dry season gives way to cooling monsoon rains.The centuries-old tradition remains so popular that people from other counties travel to Thailand to join in the water fights and they were not afraid of getting wet. Many Thais use the holiday to retreat to the countryside and pay respect to their family elders with visits to a temple and offerings to Buddhist monks in exchange for their blessings.The elderly citizens visited temples, offering food to monks and cleaning Buddha statues in a traditional ceremony as they believed it would bring them good luck.