The Celebration

  On a journey that turned out to have more highlights than we could have ever expected, the biggest one might have been what happened when we transcended into the New Year. We knew, even before crossing the border, two things about the New Year's celebration throughout China. One was that the holiday, at least while we were scheduled to be there, was reserved for family. The second was we would see lots of fireworks. Day or night, didn't matter.

  So when there were fireworks blasting during our late evening hostel dinner, we weren't surprised. When they continued somewhat consistently throughout the nine and ten o'clock hour, cracking in the sky like a roar of thunder spliced into a hundred little pieces and then thrown in every direction, we weren't surprised. No, it wasn't until after dinner, when we decided to go out for some drinks with five others, a journey which took over an hour of getting lost before we could find an open, but foreigner friendly, bar, that we were surprised. This was when we noticed across the street, at the same time as we were passing our destination, that they were selling fireworks for the masses. In fact, there were more fireworks than people.

What surprised us was the multitude of citizens, normal people, firing off a multitude of fireworks for a multitude of time. To be fair, this shows only a small part of it.

  Just from the background noise, you can begin to hear the amount of fireworks that were being shot off.