little trouble in big china

At 11:30pm tonight I had a post already written, talking about the craziness of the fireworks displays here.  About how they'd been going on for six hours, in spurts of increasing frequency, building to the inevitable midnight crescendo.  About how I could see five different displays at the same time from my living room window.  About how loud fireworks are when you're 30 feet away from them, how it really does sound like what I imagine a war zone would, and how the sky turns different colors and the smell of sulfur permeates the air.  And about how nutty it is that people just light a box of fireworks in the street and step back five paces to watch it go off, while traffic casually meanders around the boxes. 

And then 11:45 rolled around, and HOLY CRAP.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have prepared me for what happened at 11:45.  Honest to God, you could have dropped a bomb (or five) on the city and nobody would have noticed.  I'm not kidding. In perfect synchronicity, everyone who had been putting on their displays to that point ratcheted them up another five notches, and they were joined by newcomers with lots of ammunition.  On my block alone there were four huge fireworks displays, not to mention the sparklers on the sidewalks. One of the new displays set up on the street right below my bedroom window, such that fallout from the explosions actually hit my windows and exterior walls.  There's no such thing as safety distance here.  There's also nothing quite like sitting in a window watching fireworks explode on all sides of you, even headed straight at you.

Coming from a culture where fireworks displays are regulated, controlled, one-per-community affairs (if that), this is at once overwhelming, thrilling, and utterly insane.  It's as if the city is under attack; everywhere you look, there's nothing but bursts of light and sound... oh, the sound.  To call it deafening wouldn't do it justice; even inside my apartment with the windows closed, I could have used earplugs. At the peak, I could feel the vibrations from the thunder coming through my walls and floor.  And the thing is, the entire city looks like this.  Forget seeing four or five displays at a time; for twenty minutes there were four or five displays on my block, and easily twice as many visible in the distance.  I had turned off my lights for better visibility, but every corner of my apartment was visible thanks to the light thrown off by so many explosions from all sides.  It's an absolutely phenomenal,  incredible, jaw-dropping experience.

The madness -- well, the extreme madness -- went on for about half an hour; sometime after 12:30 or so things started to slow down a bit as people ran out of explosives. And although I'm sitting here listening to the odd remnant burst, idly wondering how I'm going to get to sleep tonight, I can also see missing the absolute chaos of it all next year.

Unfortunately, I can't put any video up right now, and the stills I have don't remotely convey the scene, but I'll see if we can make something happen later in the month.

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