Happy New Years, Happy Rabbit Ears.

Last night was the last night of the new year's celebration, and presumably the first night of the lunar new year, given that the moon was swollen and breaking through the soup of of exploded fireworks' ghosts. I had just eaten dinner with the whole group at a nice western cafe where I treated myself to some pan-fried spaghetti with steak and peppers, some garlic bread, and a nice glass of Bordeaux red, all for the cost of a combo meal at Wendy's. It actually did push me over my budget of eating for 6 dollars a day, but hey, it was new years an I was celebrating it my own way. Oh! And this goes out to Darby. There's a Chinese tradition of eating this certain food on the last night of celebrations, these glossy, white glutenous rice balls with yummy stuff inside of them. We ate these ones with sesame paste in them, which kind of has the texture of caviar, but it's sweet. And do you know what those pearly orbs bursting with black specks made me think of, Darby? You guessed it, spider eggs! Little translucent baby spiders just crawling down my esophagus.
Mmm.
Anyway, back at the cafe, I finished my glass of wine and we walked out into the new dusk, and were greeted by some cacophonous orchestra of booms and cracks. Right across the street, a couple of men were lighting off one of the boxes of black cats that had been the bane of our morning's existence that day. For those not familiar, black cats are tiny cylinders of gunpowder lined up two by two on a string that you light one end of, and they go "POP POP POPOPOPPOPADAPOPADAPOPOPOPOPOP  POP" and you go "wow! That was marginally fun and extremely loud!" Right, so these guys were lighting up a box at a time. During the climax it sounds less like firecrackers and more like the ocean crashing into your eardrums.
So that was happening, and instead of taking a right and heading back to the hotel, we "hung a Louie" and walked to the main street, Changan Nan lou. Best decision ever.
As we walked, we began seeing the source of some of the major booms in the night. Right across the main street, there was a legitimate Fourth of July setup on, I shit you not, the sidewalk. I'm talking about the big guns. Greens, reds, the kind that have a sparkle aftereffect, the ones that just shoot white sparks from the ground, the shimmering golden ones. Ones shaped like hearts. Blue ones that exploded in triplets. A wayward green wasn't ready to bloom at the apex and exploded about 15 feet from my head. My reaction was to grab my hat and scream "Woooooooooo!!!" at the top of my lungs, garnering the attention of locals and in hindsight making me question my instinctive reaction to danger. Nonetheless, I continued watching until that particular show was finished, which was about five minutes later.
I then went into this supermarket with some other students, which was our initial reason for going out there. This sounds strange, I know, but I had a dream about this the night before I left America. I dreamt I was in China (obviously) at night and they were celebrating the new year with lots of fireworks, and then I was in a market. But nothing spectacular happened in the store, I just bought some shampoo and notebooks and ping pong paddles.
Back outside, more fireworks. From every direction you could hear the blasts bouncing off of buildings, because it should be of not that few fireworks broke the canopy of the office and apartment buildings that crowd the skyline. My mission now was to get to higher ground. The obvious answer: our hotel's roof. Second best decision ever. Not second best, equally the best, but chronologically second. I had to crawl over a corner where there was a ten-story drop, so there was a faint element of danger in this pursuit that only added to the awesomeness of the night, and climb up a bunch of ladders until I got to a tiny (I'd say 10 feet by 20 feet) platform in the middle of the building. Once up there, I just kept spinning around, slowly, saying "wow", and occasionally, "woo!" when someone really near was shooting them off. Now they were at eye level but they were supposed to be, and in those moments, when someone ten stories below and twenty feet down the street set off a nice blue and white array, my heart sailed and my mouth went "WOOOOOO! WOOHOOHOO!!!!" I can't really describe the scene, of dozens if not hundreds of different places spitting incendiaries into the smoke-choked sky, where there wasn't a moment when you didn't hear a canon or a handgun thundering through the city. This is a really shitty analogy probably only two people will get, but it reminded me of Boom Boom Rocket.
But I'm not gonna try to poeticize fireworks. Really, you don't need to make fireworks romantic. They are inherently awesome. By their very nature. I'm just going to leave it at one of the best nights of my life. China, you have my respect and admiration. I salute you. Actually, that's deceiving. The reason why this was so awesome was that it wasn't set up by a government or a country club. It was people, going out and getting a fuckton of explosives and lighting them off wherever they please. And everyone else is totally okay with that, it seems. Which is unutterably amazing. So, Chinese people, I salute you and your penchant for reckless abandon. And I like your food too.