Happy New Year

10 pm: It is the eve of the Asian New Year. The fireworks have been going since before nightfall, and intensifying by the hour. There are bursts to be seen from all windows, 360 degrees around us, across the entire city. They explode over, around, and between buildings. Distant lights flash over and behind the horizon of layered apartment blocks, which are made to appear more distant by the obscuring smoke. From our vantage on the 5th floor, nearby rockets often explode at eye-level, just outside our windows.

Men below are lighting fireworks with a shocking recklessness. With cigarettes dangling from their lips, they scurry to light new fuses among the skipping firecrackers and flying rockets lit moments before by their fellows. They carelessly lean over the rockets as they light them, as if they are tempting them to launch prematurely. A patch of grass was on fire, but now they have stamped it out.

The sharp crack of rockets mixes with the ripping roar of endless firecracker chains, and the occasional thunder of something really big. As the sound of each explosion fades, the silence is filled by the constant wail of hundreds of car alarms.

I was about to write that it would be cliche to say it sounds like a war zone, but that made me think of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. In 1968, the Vietcong invaded Saigon in the midst of the New Year's celebration. An excellent plan, as how could anyone possibly have heard them coming?

As for tonight, there is no sign that supplies are going to run out anytime soon. People must have been storing this things by the crate in their little apartments. We should be glad the entire building didn't explode.

Updates to come as we progress through the evening...

12:30 am: I said earlier that it would be a cliche to call this a "war zone". That was before it turned into a war zone. There was a lull between about 10:45 and midnight, but that was just set up time before the main event. At midnight, the entire city went off.

When I was a kid, back before America was fully in the grip of the "nanny state" culture which now tries to protect us from every possible danger (and lawsuit) and is inexorably turning us into a nation of coddled adolescents, we had great fireworks shows in Benson, Arizona.

It really wasn't the fireworks that were that great. Actually, the rockets themself were kind of lame; the best a small town could afford, I guess. It was the atmosphere that was special. Everyone would gather on the high school football field with blankets and picnic dinners. The show was put on by the local volunteer fire department. They didn't have much to work with, and they didn't seem to really know what they were doing. There was no showmanship or timing to the launches, they just kept lighting them randomly until they ran out. The great part is that the launches were no more than thirty or forty yards from the audience. The fireworks would burst at low altitudes, sometimes right overhead. The embers often were still burning strong when they hit the ground, and dads were always anticipating the need to move blankets before they hit, and stamp out fires after they did. It was kid heaven, and it didn't even last my entire childhood before the town didn't do it that way anymore, and it faded into history.

Tonight brought back those memories, and multiplied them tenfold. We didn't watch the fireworks, we were in the fireworks. They launched from every street, sidewalk, balcony, and rooftop in the city. They sometimes burst mere feet from high rise apartment buildings, with sparks ricocheting violently off of the windows. Sometimes they deflected off of trees, causing them to explode just overhead, or even within the tree itself, blowing leaves everywhere. The sound was a constant roar, this time we couldn't hear all of the car alarms. Smoke lay in heavy blankets, even drifting into doorways. Meanwhile, people wandered the streets everywhere, while dogs barked and stray cats ran all directions in panic.

I suggest you come to China for New Year's Eve someday. They probably still have a lot of years left before the nanny state takes over and makes sure that no one does anything dangerous (or fun).

We don't have any cameras that would capture the full effect of the chaos in the darkness, but I'm going to set my alarm so I can get pictures of the aftermath before the army of little-old-lady street cleaners beats me to it. It's a war zone of paper and cardboard out there.

8 am: The fireworks died out around 2 am. I don't know if they ever went away completely, or did so just enough that we could sleep. At 6 am, they began again in earnest, so now I'm up again.
Unfortunately, even by then I had missed the chance to take the pictures that I really wanted. I beat the little old lady street sweepers to the action (they were already working, but there is too much debris for them to even make a dent so far), but I forgot to account for the roving cardboard recycling guys. With their battered little bicycle/pick-up trucks, they are constantly on patrol for anything that they can get a bit of cash for, and they must have cleaned up all of the spent launch tubes and casings during the night.

I did go out and get a few pictures, and I'll post them later. There hasn't been any big explosions nearby for a while, and I'm going to try for some more sleep. John woke up just enough to move to the couch. Lee and the girls appear to have slept through it, and Janet (who is visiting) isn't up and about. I can't imagine she didn't wake up for a while, because there was a guy setting off rockets on that side of our building an hour ago, and as I've said, they often explode at window level for us.

Jan. 30th picture update, 9:15 pm:


Two scenes of the aftermath. The scene doesn't do the mess justice, because as I said, the cardboard recyclers had already done their work. Here is one guy still at it at 7:00 am. He was not the only one. In fact, they are all still going strong, as their are fireworks going even as I write. Last night was the 5th day after New Years, which is a holiday in its own right, and had fireworks almost as big as the first night.



One of the army of street-sweeping ladies, who was on the job by 6:30 am.

This last thing is a little video montage I strung together without too much care into it. I'll work on getting better video technology sometime. I tried to capture the fact that the fireworks were going on all around us, but it doesn't in any way capture the true feeling of close proximity. Note the constant flashes on the horizon, John yelling right at the beginning, and the guy shooting a Roman candle out of his window near the end.

note: video won't save right now.... I'll try again later.