I finally have photos to aid me in my attempt to describe the undescribeable - the insane Thingyan holiday, aka “the water festival” in Myanmar.
First a little background:
Thingyan is the name of the Burmese new year holiday.
It’s celebrated over the course of 5 days in April according to the Buddhist calendar.
It’s the most important public holiday in Myanmar.
It coincides with the both the peak of the dry/hot season and the beginning of kiddies summer vacation from school.
In the past, it was a traditional part of the festival to sprinkle water into a silver bowl, to metaphorically “wash away ones sins” before the beginning of the new year. This has morphed into an all out water fight involving buckets, hoses, and water guns that persists through all 5 days, hence the modern name “Water festival”.
For more info, check out the Thingyan wikipedia entry.
Now some more specifics about the “water” part. Here are a few typical street scenes during the festival. This is what it looked like everywhere in Yangon and Mandalay over the five days of the festival:

Everywhere, and i mean EVERYWHERE, there are people in the street with the buckets and hoses just waiting for someone to walk or drive by. From my observations, no one is exempt except for monks. Women, young children, the elderly, a car with a window rolled down, everyone gets a bucket of water poured on them if they are out in public. Foreigners are especially popular to douse. It appeared to me that anyone who spots a foreigner coming informs everyone else nearby so they can have their water spraying implement ready and/or begin an active pursuit of the targets. There are no exceptions, for example, if you’re holding a camera, which made it challenging to get photos of the action!
Clustered around town are sponsored “hose stations”; a stage facing the street with a dozens of hoses for partakers to use:
Lots of folks, especially teenagers and young adults, pile into trucks and jeeps and drive slowly around town getting repeatedly soaked with water and throwing their own buckets at random people they pass . In the areas with high concentrations of hose stations there are also crowds of people dancing in the street amidst the spraying water.