Ezra Abroad: YEAR OF THE TIGER!!!!

Xin Nian Kuai Le (Happy New Year)

I had a real misconception about Chinese New Year. I always thought that is was similar to the Calendar New Year, except just a couple months off. You know, everyone stays up till midnight, lights a sparkler, gives a kiss, and goes to bed. Maybe a dragon-train thrown in there somewhere. Boy was I wrong! Chinese New Year is so huge that it takes a whole week to fit in all the festivities and fireworks.

Basically, it starts on February 14^th, so Valentines Day will always have its holiday-butt kicked by Chinese New Year. And the butt kicking doesn’t stop there, for the next seven days, it sounds like you’re in WWII. I wish I was exaggerating, but people set off fireworks everywhere for about 7 straight days. My favorite part is that no safety measures are taken. They’ll light them off in the streets between two skyscrapers. God forbid you’re on the 25^th floor with your window open because you’re going to have a shower of red sparks come flying into your bedroom. I actually saw a cab swerve around a bottle rocket going off.

My Fireworks Experience…

I lit off a bunch of other people’s fireworks, but unfortunately none of my own. Not that I didn’t try to go out and buy the ‘biggest and baddest’ Chinese fireworks I could find. My friend and I went down this really shady street (Not aware at the time you could buy them in the grocery store) to try and find some fireworks. We finally found this store with big ones, small ones, decorated ones, plain ones, and every sort of one you could imagine. I personally have been saving up for this and spent about $150.00 US dollars on merchandise. I mean, how many times do you get to legally set off fireworks in the country that actually invented them!?!? So I didn’t feel guilty at all. We bought ones ranging from about a foot in length to ones that were 5 feet tall. We were practically drooling with anticipation in the cab ride back to our apartment. So when we finally arrived, we made sure we had a safe perimeter (about 6 feet), took out our lighter, lid the biggest one, ran for cover, and……nothing. Well, not nothing, it was smoking a little bit. And you know the saying, where there's smoke, there's fire....works. Needless to say, we stayed crouched behind our trashcan for about 5 minutes because neither one of us wanted to approach it to see why it was only smoking. After a while we decided it was just defective. So we lit one of the smaller ones, and it too just kinda smoked a little. Turns out, I bought $150.00 dollars worth of PRAYERSTICKS!!!! You light these guys and they smoke for hours and hours and you prayers go up to heaven with the smoke. The bigger the prayer stick, the bigger your prayer. Now, I’m not saying I have anything against prayer sticks, it just would have been nice if my prayers went up in a shower of sparks followed by an loud explosion.