Chinese New Year

As if things in China weren’t already ridiculous, they decided it was a great idea to make cheap fireworks available to the entire populous for the Lunar New Year.

I understand that at midnight you have to blow off fireworks to scare off the dragons. There is a myth that one time a dragon was going to attack a village but was scared by noise and fire. As far as I can tell, most things in China are set up to keep the dragons away.

The Chinese New Year is like our Christmas I think. You get a week off and most people travel to their hometowns to be with their family. New Year’s Eve is like the big Christmas dinner and everyone gets presents. After that, they go outside and blow off professional grade fireworks in the street.

My apartment building is in a pretty Chinese part of town but it is expensive for the locals. As such, the Chinese people in my apartments have enough money to buy some serious firepower. At about 11:00 there were about 6 people with huge piles of fireworks inside the courtyard. They have enormous rolls of firecrackers that never stop and meanwhile they send up mortars that blow up right outside my windows. I stepped outside and got hit with fragments of paper or something. My apartment smelled like gunpowder (which made me wonder if the thing that looks like a smoke detector is what I think it is). Sometimes the stuff was still smoldering when it hit the balcony.

The best is when the fireworks go up, do not explode and then come back down. After they blow up on the ground, everyone ducks, laughs and the 5 year olds keep running around with sparklers.

After a while, I met some people down by the river where we had a great view on a balcony. At midnight, the town went absolutely ballistic. It was non-stop for at least an hour. We kept getting hit with debris from some guys who had a freaking arsenal in the alley below the balcony.

I’m sure that if I could read the local paper, it would tell me that several people were maimed or killed in their efforts to scare off the dragons.

Either way, Chinese New Year is definitely one of the coolest holidays I have witnessed.