Bridge Over River Kwai

Whatever you did this weekend, I assure you that what I did was cooler.


I went to Kanchanaburi with Miss Chinda (academic director of Prabhassorn) and her husband (art teacher at Prabhassorn). We stayed with their family and went to the Festival on River Kwai.
The car ride from Chonburi was brutal. I felt like I was going to die from shaken baby syndrome. It seemed like there was construction going on EVERYWHERE. What I cant figure out is what the hell they were doing, because they certainly werent fixing the giant potholes and bumps in the middle of the freeway.

We arrived in Kanchanaburi and spent some time at the house. It was cool to hang out with some actual Thai people on a weekend. The house was really wild too. It wasnt anything like houses of the average American family. For instance, the front door is just some slats that you close and lock with a pad lock. Although the futon w/ mosquito netting we slept on was 1000xs more comfortable than my bed in Chonburi.

The neighborhood kids thought we were just fancinating and we played tag for awhile. But then it turned into this creepy game of "throw animal bones at the foreigners", so that was the end of that.

Ok, now we are at the river, which by the way is pronounced like "kw-aye" not "kw-eye". We are allowed to just walk all over the bridge, which seems odd to me since the bridge is in no way safe. There was a sign that said to be careful if a train happens to show up. Thanks.
The show that was going on was an annual reenactment of the bombing of the bridge. You know, celebrate love & peace & shit. So there was supposed to be a light show/fireworks display and we would have headsets that would tell us the story of the bridge in English. At least this is how it was explained to me.


The show starts out and a train goes over the bridge and there is a lazer light and the bridge is lit up several different colors and then the train goes away while some cheezy music by, I dont know- Journey or someone, is playing in my headset. Im thinking...that was lame.

Then the fun started. I enjoyed every second because Im nerdy history like that. But the culmination is the point in the story where they actually bomb the bridge. This was not your typical fireworks display with "ooh"s and "ahh"s and that sort of thing. This was full scale reenacted warfare!

Imagine a soundtrack playing full blast of airplanes and helicopters and men screaming while fireworks are coming out of the trees and then exploding off the bridge, as if the damn thing were actually blowing up! Then fireworks are going on from the river (they floated fireworks on these rafts in the river, it was so cool) and the Japanese lookout towers on the bridge are set on fire and fall into the river below and bombs are going off and there are bush fires starting on the banks of the river and...IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME! It was total chaos!

I had no idea what to think. Except that my father would have really enjoyed that.
Then we rode home in the back of the pickup truck which was ridiculously fun since it is 1) stupid & dangerous and 2) completely illegal in the United States.