Much too loud, too long;
Alien celebration;
Deeply tedious.
The firework mayhem seems a little more subdued this year (or maybe I just live in a "quiet" neighbourhood?), but it was starting to get rolling in earnest last night - two full days ahead of the actual New Year's Eve holiday. And it will go on and on and on and on for the next two or three weeks. I found this an intriguing novelty when I first came here; but now it's just a HUGE bore. I can't wait for it to be over. In fact, I may just quit the country for a while to get away from it....
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One thing I'm still not used to from living in the Deep South, USA, is that people here celebrate practically every occasion -- not just holidays -- with fireworks. It makes for very nervous pets.
A few years after we moved into this house in a subdivision, a teenager from across the street decided to celebrate -- apparently -- January 8th. No, there's no occasion then. He was just feeling larky and I guess had a store of fireworks left over from the New Year's pyrotechnic orgy.
Alas, the rocket which he launched went up just a little bit, and then over -- coming to earth directly on the dead Christmas tree on our curb. He came to our door, shame-faced, to confess, after he'd extinguished the flames. I goggled a bit at the sight: a more or less perfect Christmas-tree-shaped scalene triangle of burnt grass, still smoldering, with a blackened stick (the one-time trunk) running up the center. It was a little too neat to have been quite so accidental, but that was his story.
Hmm, yes, suspicious.
But imagine your neighbour times 5 million, all looking to start fires for two weeks straight. The figures here are just colossal, they stagger the mind: number of fireworks let off, amount of money expended, visibility limited by gunpowder smoke (occasionally necessitating airport closure). The only thing they never talk about is the number of casualties from firework-related accidents. I'm guessing it's well into the thousands, in Beijing alone.
I guess that's an advantage of having a population in the billions: a thousand here, a thousand there... [insert shrug of official insouciance]
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