Songkran: the premonsoon season monsoon

I arrived in Chiang Mai on April 12th, the first day of the Thai new year.  I mentioned in a previous post that to celebrate the new year Thai people splash water on each other to wash away the bad from last year and get a fresh start in the new year.  The festival lasts three days, but the first day is the biggest.  On the first day the statues of Buddha are brought out from the temples and paraded through town where everyone throws water on them, the water is collected beneath the statues and thown back on the crowd as blessed water.  That is the main action of the traditional festival, besides that it is traditionally a family event when people come home to be with family, a lot like we do at Christmas.  But that has nothing to do with Songkran in Chiang Mai.  Chiang Mai has the largest Songkran festival in Thailand and it amounts to a three day long, city wide water fight.  People pile into the backs of pickup trucks with big garbage cans full of water and race through town dumping buckets of water on everyone they can.  At the same time people sit out in front of their houses with hoses spraying all the passers by.  Old town is where it gets really crazy, the streets are packed with people and cars splashing each other while stores and restraunts blast music into the street.  There are water vending machines where for 1 Baht (about 3 cents) where you can fill up your bucket, or you just fill it up in one of the canals.  This time of year is perfect for Songkran since it is right at the end of the dry season.  Unlike in North America winters in Thailand are cooler and dry while summers are hot and wet.  Right now it is in between the dry and wet season, so it is hot like summer but still really dry (so far it has been near 100 degrees every day). Luckily if your on the street you can't go more than 5 minutes without getting a face full of water so at least as we're walking around things aren't too bad.  Especially on the first day we got here it seemed like the monsoon season had already started with the amount of water falling all around me.  What ever astronomical reason there is for Songkran happening right now i think really it is also an excuse for people to get time off work and play in the water.  Yesterday was the last day of Songkran so things should calm down now. 
Despite all this talk of parties there has also been schooling.  We've gone on two day hikes now, one by a local resevoir and one in nearby Doi Suthep national park.  in those two areas we got introduced to the two main types of forests around here dry, fire prone, desciduous woodlands at the lower elavations (below 100 meters) and fire resistant evergreen forests at higher elavations (not pine forests like our evergreens but broadleafed evergreens mixed with a few pines). Today we will be going to see an organic farmer from Chicago and learn about sustainable farming in tropic regions.  Tomorrow we will be heading up into the mountains for a week long excursion where hopefully it will be a little cooler, though Thailand just doesn't get all that high so it won't be too much cooler. I'm really looking forward to this, apparently we will be hiking through some Jungle areas, and get to explore a number of limestone cave, as well as doing homestays in a couple indigenous villages.  Thai forests here i come.