CNY: The Fireworks

“Boom”

“Bang”

“Bam”

The sounds of Chinese New Years 2010.  It is insane the amount of noise these small stature people can create.  This is the sounds assaulting my ears for the past several days and I am beginning to go a little nuts.  Have I always had a twitch in my left eye?  Why does it only happen when a I hear the “BOOM” of a firework. 

Fireworks start in full earnest about 10 minutes to midnight on New Years Eve. It has been explained that fireworks are used to chase the bad spirits away from your home/neighborhood.

Honestly, fireworks go off here several times a day.  Most days of the week I am awoken around 6am to the sounds of your basic fireworks…bang, bang, bang. These are people announcing that they are starting a new job, school, baby born in the night, went poo for the first time in several days.  You do fireworks the day you move into a new apartment to chase away bad things and make the home welcoming for your family.  The only thing they don’t seem to acknowledge with fireworks is the passing of a loved one.  That is done by burning ceremonial money and the clothing of the deceased for them to use in the “Land of the Ancestors”.

This year the weather add an interesting element to the festivities.  SNOW.  Our community may get a light dusting of snow but this was more then a dusting.  As we sat in front of the wall of windows in Catherine’s apartment on the 19th floor to watch the fireworks going off all over the city of Nanjing, we were treated to the bonus of watching a couple inches of snow fall in less then an hour.  Unfortunately add a big snow to all the smoke of the fireworks and you get very little visibility.  Not that it deterred the people out lighting to fireworks.  That continued throughout the night.  Anyone that has watched CNN coverage of the first few days of the bombings in Iraq, well, that is what it sounds like, all rolled into one night. 

I cannot tell you how seriously they take this…..I can tell you that I am 72 hours into a 15 day festival and I just had to take a Xanax to keep me from flinching every 7 or so minutes.