After a great New Year's celebration in the bush it was time to celebrate another one in the East. Chinese New Year is marked by the first new moon of the year. On the Chinese calendar it falls on February 14th this year, marking the beginning of the year of the tiger.
Again, words cannot explain it. The celebrations run 15 days until the Chinese Lantern Festival marking the first full moon of the year. The city sleeps for 15 days. No honking horns. No playing Frogger to cross the street. Only loud and overwhelming fireworks every night with the largest on New Years eve.
These fireworks are not set up by the city or some professional, but rather sold on every street corner in orange tents lined with boxes of fireworks. We are used to individual fireworks that we buy on certain holidays. Now imagine a box, something the size of a microwave. Some even the size night table. You light this thing in the middle of the street and you get a professional looking fireworks show for 2 or 3 minutes. And that is just on one corner of an intersections in a city with many intersections. The sky was a sparkling sea of colour. The buildings echoed.
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