Happy Niu Year!

It is shortly after midnight and fireworks still light the sky as Beijing welcomes the Year of the Ox (Niu) with a bang. We started hearing fireworks a week ago, but today they really went wild. The sound woke me this morning and the racket hasn't stopped since.

Fireworks are legal here and clearly form an integral part of everyone's celebration. Unlike in the States where fireworks are a communal celebration usually sponsored by the city and carefully supervised by the fire department, here they are available for purchase on every street corner and families set them off in the streets by the case.

During the day the excitement was mostly confined to low-level noise makers, but starting around seven the sky was steadily lit by the flair of rockets bursting. I have seen more spectacular fireworks shows, choreographed to music, designed to paint pictures in the sky and so forth, but I've never seen the volume of fireworks in one place that I've seen tonight.

Shortly before midnight I glanced out the window to check on the latest round and noticed people out on the street in front of our building lining up cases of fireworks. As midnight hit they lit the lot...literally 3 dozen cases of fireworks hit the sky simultaneously! And that was just one location, on the corner two other volleys were going from the vacant lot. The next block had it's own batch, there were fireworks appearing behind the building across the street from us, in the park at the other corner, and reflections in the windows showed a batch just around the corner. Looking from another window we could see two more sets on the other side of our complex, and literally dozens of locations further away (and that's just through the narrow gaps between the high-rises that let us see further).

By midnight the smoke was so thick we could no longer see the brightly lit buildings in the next block. As the fireworks rose from the street in front of us they warmed the air so much that despite temperatures well below zero, the air blowing in the window was warm on my face.

This video is probably not very good, but might give you a sense of what we've been listening to all day.



Off to wash the smoke out of my hair...