The last day of the year of the rat! We received text messages to inform the public that fire works and rife crackers were allowed within the 5 th ring road of Beijing starting from midnight. Strangely we have been hearing fire crackers already the last few days. This is the first year that real fire works are allowed. But somehow I remember seeing them in one of the past New Years too. We made dinner at home as we assumed all restaurants would be closed or at least hardly any one open tonight. At midnight everybody went crazy with fire crackers. There were some beautiful huge fire works as well.
But the main thing is fire crackers as loud as possible to scare away all the bad demons of the New Chinese Year. They have rolls and carpets of fire crackers that you just light on the one side and it goes on forever. It soon got really smokey in our yard. Especially because some people started the idea of putting the boxes of firecrackers inside a cardboard box and then lighting them hoping to make louder sounds. Instead I had the feeling that it just created more smoke and it was shooting burning cardboard pieces all over the place.
I also found it great that they just lighted the fire crackers in the middle of the road.
Here is the link to my snap video of Chinese New Years Eve. And the noise is the actual fire crackers that in reality sound more like bombs. Happy „Niu“ Year as the Chinese say this year. Because „Niu“ means cow and this is the year of the cow.