Happy New Years!!

It started around 8 in the evening, at first just a couple of fire crackers going off, maybe some flashy bottle rockets. Slowly the pageantry started to escalate. A couple dozen fire crackers became a couple hundred, bottle rockets turned into full on fireworks. By midnight it was like I was living in early 1940’s Berlin during an RAF raid*. Shit going off everywhere, bright explosions in the sky, the crackling of machine gun fire, err I mean fire crackers going off in the streets. It was quite a show.

Chinese New Years was in full swing. This being the civilization that first invented cool explosions, it only seemed right that everyone buy as many exploding projectiles as they can, aim them at the many tall buildings around the city, and let loose. This is the first time seeing what fireworks looked like on the receiving end. For those of you curious to know, most Chinese made fireworks will either explode accidentally on the ground due to improper manufacturing or detonate around the 27th floor of a building (when people are trying to sleep.) It was really cool to see one explode right in front of my window, but after the 30th or so, it gets a little annoying. It’s like a war zone here… a beautiful, flamboyantly colored war zone…

Various shots of the city below, managed to get some shells exploding right outside my window:

*I know, the reference is a little dated and I should have picked a more recent conflict like Baghdad 2003, but then I thought “hmm… maybe too soon for an Iraq zinger.