PlatKat.com

Even though I abandoned my delusions of grandeur about writing a barrage of posts about Shanghai when I returned, I was meaning to discuss the celebration of Chinese New Year, which fell on January 26th this year. It may be recognized by the world on that one measly day, but if you’re living east of the Huangpu River, it is recognized at least one week before and three weeks after and then sporadically after that with billions of the loudest, brightest, most dangerous fireworks known to man, all night every night and even during the day, until you go batshit insane from smokey shrapnel and lack of sleep.

So needless to say, I wasn’t exactly feeling the Fourth of July fireworks show anywhere in the US. Here, we go for quality, not quantity, and a half-hour show of our prettiest stuff is all we need to walk home happy. Even so, I felt I had seen and heard enough to last a lifetime, so I wasn’t planning on looking for a show, let alone attending one.

In Shanghai, it is legal to light fireworks anywhere in the area where I was staying. So people did. They lit them off in crowded streets among pedestrians and in busy traffic with passing cars. I’m no fireworks aficionado, but I’m going to attempt to clarify anyway: Not the little ones, the big ones. I’m not talking about the sparklers kids play with, but the dangerous explosives we light over large bodies of water in the US. People were lighting those in the courtyard in front of our building, which is surrounded by other buildings. Every morning, we awoke to the red paper remains of the previous night’s jolts all over our balcony. We were on the 8th floor.

I was pleased to be in a quieter situation at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott in Dana Point. It’s about an hour south of where I’m staying in Al-Ham-Bra and exactly as advertised. As Flavor Flav would say, “Varry, varry romantical.”

But do you know what isn’t romantical? LOUD NOISES! …And being nearly hit in the face with a used cylinder casing. This happened when my friend Dan and I were walking through a narrow Shanghai street more characteristic of old China (smaller buildings, laundry hanging on lines stretched across second-story windows, live animals clucking, snapping, and flipping until it’s time to become someone’s dinner, etc). Someone lit a moderately large one and the heaviest piece of its remains almost hit me squarely in the nose, had Dan not stretched out his hand to catch it just a nanosecond before. Yikes.

To celebrate this Fourth of July, I ate dinner by the harbor and kept my face far away from anything even resembling fireworks.

The fireworks started up on the walk back to our room, but we didn’t care so much. I was more interested in avoiding the crowds that had gathered at the beachfront by our hotel to watch the show. But when we got back to our room, I opened the curtains and there were the fireworks, popping quietly off in the distance, but still in plain view of our patio.

So even though I wasn’t super-excited about the fireworks to begin with, I became excited when I found that I could watch them from my room when everyone else had to watch them from a blanket on the crowded beach. Suddenly I forgot that I had to look at them (or at least hear them) every day for a month in Shanghai and had sworn them off for good. It’s a supply and demand thing.

BTW, you three people who read this, there’s no need to explain Shanghai’s avid use of fireworks with the fact that the Chinese invented them. I know that. Everyone does. The only thing that bugs me more than constant loud noises are people who cite well-known facts as if they were imparting some obscure piece of knowledge on an ignorant soul.