Chinese New Year

The street was hazy with spent gunpowder. There were firecrackers going off everywhere, whistling bottle rockets flying past my head, roman candles being shot down towards the street from apartments, and the explosions from the heavier fireworks rocked the pedestrian bridge over a small river that I was standing on and caused car alarms to go off. It was the Chinese New Year Spring Festival or Chunjie, and the locals were going at it. With me carrying a huge bag of assorted fireworks that are illegal in most states in the US was Yin Mo Ran and his friend from next door and Wang Ping, Dr. Yin's wife.

 

We stood on the bridge and shot roman candles over the river, shot two nice and loud explosive flowers up, and felt the bridge shake when some young teenages dropped some big firecrackers into the water and then exploded. When we ran out of ammo we met up with the young doctor and her friends who had two large boxes in the trunk of her Jetta. We proceeded out into the suburbs where it got thick. In an area being developed there were some bulldozed plots of land and people were just lining the streets letting her have it. Everyone and their grandmother was lighting something, and we rolled up the windows after some close calls with flying debris. We parked and watched the action for a while. Random people would run out into this field, set up, light, and run back. It was like watching a fireworks show in the US except everything was being shot 10 meters from you. This girl's friends carried their boxes, each of which required two people to carry, out into the field and lit them off. Each box cost about $120 US. They were quite impressive. The funnier moments were when the car alarms would go off after a boom and when the men would light the kind that shoot out of a cylinder and explode, but after lighting the cylinder would fall over and so we would have explosions, like the big flower ones, right in front of us. The lights would zip across the ground. It was an adrenaline rush. Well worth seeing.