Farang Wearing Floral Shirt During Songkran Unknowingly Declares Open Season on Himself
By KIP DUNGWORTH, STAFF REPORTER
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND — A British tourist in a floral-print button-up unknowingly triggered a city-wide ambush Friday, after stepping into Chiang Mai’s Old Town dressed like a walking invitation for festive, water-based violence.
The man, identified only as “Todd from Leeds” by the hostel staff who refused to help him dry off, was soaked, spun around, and publicly humiliated within 90 seconds of exiting a tuk-tuk.
Witnesses say he wore dark sunglasses, flip-flops, and a synthetic hibiscus-pattern shirt — the unofficial uniform of clueless foreign Songkran participants since at least 1994.
“He basically declared war on himself,” said one Thai vendor, loading ice into a cooler with surgical precision. “That shirt is a surrender flag, but in reverse.”
Songkran, Thailand’s New Year celebration, is three days of collective aquatic catharsis disguised as a national holiday. No one is safe. But tourists in novelty shirts are, by tradition and instinct, the first to fall.
By noon, Todd had been hit with three garden hoses, two Super Soakers, a full cooler dump from a second-floor guesthouse, and what appeared to be a direct rice whiskey spit-take from a scooter passenger.
“I think I’m done now,” he told no one in particular, standing in a puddle that was once his dignity. A group of ten-year-olds immediately blasted him in the ear.
He later tried to buy a poncho from a roadside stall, only to have it politely refused. “It’s too late,” the vendor told him. “You’re part of it now.”
As of press time, Todd was sitting shirtless on the curb, holding a deflated water balloon and staring into the middle distance. The shirt — damp, defeated, and flapping slightly in the breeze — remained stuck to a nearby telephone pole, like a war relic no one wanted to claim.