INCOMING!

Chinese New Year's is....intense. After waaaaay too much food and letting it digest a bit, we went outside to watch the fireworks and light off some of our own. American July 4th doesn't even come close. This was 360 degrees of heavy explosives streaking through the night sky for well over an hour. It wasn't set off from one central location for safety, like in America, but everyone had their own, all over everywhere and they flew all over the sky. The sounds of heavy booms and the sharp cracks of big firecrackers, along with the bright explosions, led one person to say "it was the closest to urban combat, that we'd ever come." We could look right under the fireworks and at one point, the burnt out shells from them landed at our feet. One of our coworkers had bought a box of random odds and ends from a street vendor and when we lit them off, we were surprised at the distance, size and power of the fireworks/rockets. All but the most basic of what we lit off tonight would have been illegal to buy in the US and I'm sure many safety laws were violated all over the city with nearly every one of the 20 million occupants lighting off something. The country that invented it, still has a monopoly on the biggest, loudest and brightest of them.

I have never had so much fun on New Years then I did tonight.