Tuesday February 23

Living in Shanghai last week was like living in a heavy-fire warzone, except the artillery didn't usually destroy anything. I was expecting that the Chinese would do a large firework show over the river or something, and that'd be largely it other than the occasional firecracker. There was no organized firework show: instead, every Shanghaier spent I'd guess about 1000rmb on ordnance. Here is one of the 'smaller' shows:
They sell those big fireworks on the corner in lieu of sparklers: serious business! If you've ever seen some of the grittier WW2 movies, any kind of night-time aerial bombardment of a city, that is what New Year's was like: clouds of gunpowder smoke meandering through the streets, there was so much iodine and particulate in the air that what was supposed to be a slightly humid night resulted in snow falling thick over entire street intersections littered 2-3cm deep of firework cardboard. I'd like to emphasize the fact I am not using hyperbole or any kind of exaggeration! It was like walking through autumn leaves much of the time, there was so much fireworks on the streets. 1000rmb bought you either 10-minutes of mega-firecrackers, or roughly 16 mortars of explosive fireworks (these two being the most popular to do). When 19,213,200 live in a city, and each family spends about 1400rmb or so, you can imagine the firepower!

It was like that for a week, the sky lighting up constantly with explosions until about 2 in the morning. It was really very cool! Sadly, fireworks are *quite* difficult to get pictures of on my camera, as it goes into nighttime mode and tends to only catch the fading light (it's a bit slow on the click). Just imagine the biggest fireworks show you've gone and went to, and then put that right next to your apartment building, and move the explosions down from hundreds of feet above to just about the third story: I swear that there was only enough in the mortar and the fuse was just short enough so that the firework explosion didn't hit the ground (although perhaps only a foot overhead). No such precaution about not hitting people's windows though! The above pictures' show very often had the shells bouncing off the apartment windows, resulting in truncated spheres of explosions, the rest showering off the walls.

Awesome!