Fun with Fireworks

Happy Chinese New Year!!

The day started with lots of drums , firecrackers, and dragons. And lions! All at the Hyatt. The lions did all sorts of great acrobatic tricks. At the end, there was an interesting act where kids could "feed" red envelopes (full of money) to the lions.

For lunch, we went to my paternal grandmother's place, where Dad proudly demonstrated the new internet connection that he'd set up for my grandmother. We tried to use AIM and Google Talk to chat with my brother in LA, and I think we timed the maximum latency at 14 seconds. Dial-up sucks. We gave up pretty quickly.

Nighttime brought far more excitement. Fireworks in Taiwan are sort of like under-age drinking in the U.S. -- it's illegal to sell them, but not illegal to have them! And I'm not just talking about sparklers. I mean 6-pack-sized boxes of explosives -- the type that shoot way high into the air. All my cousins and one of my uncles (Xiao Yizhang, little uncle married to my mom's youngest sister) went to nearby Tianmu Park to set off the fireworks.

At some point, we accidentally lit one of the big fireworks under a bunch of trees. Yeah oops. After we got over the initial fear of having set a tree on fire, and then the secondary disappointment of having wasted one of the big fireworks (since we couldn't see it explode through all the leaves), I realized, hey wait, this is kind of unsafe, right? After all, irresponsible people like us were setting off fireworks all over the city! I asked my cousins -- don't you think there should be stricter laws about this? In America, fireworks are illegal -- even the sparklers.

Awesome response: "Yeah, but you guys can buy guns."