This is what I heard about Thingyan – the three-day water festival celebrated in the sweltering heat of mid-April to ring in the Myanmar New Year – in the weeks before it started:

It moved boisterous behavior focused (as the name “water festival” suggests) on giving and getting the gift of wetness, using everything from water buckets to hoses and squirt guns as means of delivery. Indeed, I had been told, it was nearly impossible to take more than three steps from your front door without being on the receiving end of a good soaking. The only people exempt were monks and pregnant women.

I was also told that the action centered on hundreds of pandals –high wooden stages – that are temporarily erected throughout town for the festival. They are sponsored by various groups or businesses, representatives of which stand on the stages dancing to thunderous music and doling out endless lines of vehicles that are piled high with passengers who wait in those lines for the express purpose of having endless doses of water doled out.

Meanwhile, many of my Myanmar friends announced plans to spend the holiday break in monasteries, reminding me that Thingyan was essentially a religious festival, a chance to wash away the misdeeds of the previous 12 months and start the New Year afresh. Many other s who would not be meditating said they would say home to be with family, cook food, and catch up on reading …..Oh yeah, and stay dry.

But not me. I was in full battle mode. I had my guns, I had my rations and I had my earplugs (for the water, not the music).

So, on to the diary:

DAY ONE: Stepped out the house, got wet. I had been invited by a friend to spend the day on his neighborhood pandal. While those around me held limp and leaky water hoses, as a guest I was given the privilege of manning one of two powerful water cannons. As promised, an endless queue of passenger-laden trucks, cars and jeeps pulled up, and what could I do but give them what they had come for?

To each I bestowed a blast or two of water upside the head before aiming at the next lucky customer. “Misdeeds, be gone!” I shouted. Some cowered in silence as I irrigated their hairdos, some screamed, their water sources with ice, reducing the temperature to about two degrees Celsius. Whenever I got hit by one of these freezing streams, I did some screaming of my own.

At lunchtime, when the pandals close down and everything grows quiet for a couple hours, we retreated to the host’s house for lunch. In mid-afternoon we headed back out to recommence the process of soaking all comers until about six o’clock, when the festivities stopped for the day.