january best bits included:
– rome (and some of the best tiramisu of our lives)
– a trip to the north of italy, to surprise a friend on his birthday
– the return of sherlock!
– a lot of good food with friends
– trying out a new co-working space
– chinese new year!
Tag: chinese new year
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and on the 5th day…
… of christmas chinese new year, it’s the “god of fortune and wealth” birthday. to invite him in, what do you do? fireworks, of course.
because p.’s company wouldn’t pass the opportunity to attract wealth (and having fun firing some big artillery), we were invited to join the party on the boss’ house rooftop, still covered in snow.
for a couple of hours or so, we marvelled at the view from the 40th floor: everywhere we looked, fireworks and strings of firecrackers exploded loudly and bubbles of color filled the air. it’s one of those sights that really takes your breath away. (but if you dared to close you eyes for a second, i reckon the noise around you and smell of gunpowder would certainly prompt imaginary visions of armageddon)
anyway, all in all, it was fun. i don’t know how to efficiently photograph fireworks (especially with frozen hands and toes) so these are my humble tries.
you can find a lot of better pictures of it on flickr.
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so how was the chinese new year?
in a word: crazy. or genious. :D
i don’t know how to describe it, since i had never seen anything like this before. on time blog, someone wrote “…roughly the same as Christmas Eve (with the pyrotechnics of July 4 thrown in.)”
it was like being inside a computer game where you conquer and win everything and then at the end of the level everything erupts in joy and fireworks. something like that. surreal yet inexplicably beautiful, putting any fireworks show i’ve ever seem to shame. the city just exploded, and for hours wherever i looked there were fireworks, or strings of firecrackers on the floor!
here’s how it sounded like from our little window on the 31st floor: chinese new year.
crazy, right? as if you were in the middle of an air raid. i bet that if china had been attacked at midnight, no one would notice.
(and we can still hear them sparsely, now and then. yesterday we had to interrupt a movie we were watching more than a couple of times because we couldn’t hear anything with the noise… )