Spring Festival Fireworks #1

Spring Festival is in full swing, which means that everything is very loud. It's ten at night here and people are setting off M-80s and huge strings of black cats outside my window. Last year I only really blew stuff up for a day or so before retreating into my house (due to shell shock), but this year I've had a lot of fun blowing up anything I can wherever and whenever. In case you can't tell from the picture, I'm enjoying myself.

Two night ago was the kickoff. We went to Holly's house to eat dumplings and have ridiculous, dangerous fun. Her son Josh, as a Chinese person, was our designated artillery sergeant a

nd assisted the white people in operating in relative safety. There were a few misfires, but no one got hurt. It was like a warzone that night; most people went inside to watch the Spring Festival show on TV, but after that everyone went to their communal courtyards and commenced turning the place into a warzone. The streets were filled with smoke and barren of people; everyone was at home, but the skies were filled with competing reports of mortar shells.

Yesterday was a lot quieter. Most of the shops in town were closed. Less explosions. The malls were open or business, but there was no line at Dairy Queen so I treated myself right.

One of the best parts about Spring Festival is that there are fireworks stands everywhere, usually just heaps of explosives piled on a pair of folding tables on inauspicious street corners. Safety last: a year ago, one of the stands caught wind of a wandering spark and exploded all over the street.

The best stands are the ones that do free demonstrations of their wares. A place near the Jinshui Canal shot off very loud things along with other things that shot up in the air before parachuting the burned out core to the earth and safety. Last night we came across a stand willing to show off their biggest, loudest and most colorful before we bought. They were more than willing to show off their 20rmb per round gi-fucking-gantic artillery shells. They were also willing to negotiate with me.

Email #3: in which Eddie Murphy saves my internet

My internet crashed last night, disrupting my plans to talk to my girlfriend on Skype this morning from ChinaFort1. Email #1 was me apologizing for the disruption. Email #2 was me telling her about how, in the face of mandatory achievement awards for finishing classes despite academic accomplishments, I gave a student a perfectly reasonably award laden with hard-to-detect innuendo about his future as a bachelor. Here's number three, written while the glow of the resumption of home broadband access washed over my ecstatic face (and please note that the moniker "Boo-boo" is for variety of pet names ONLY, and should not assumed to be my normal greeting protocol in any non-randomized situation):

Hey Boo-boo,

I can normally deal with internet outages if I know they're coming, like when I go on vacation without my computer, or when I see a plain white van across the street occupied by men in black suits eyeing me through binoculars, all while nonchalant, orange-helmeted linemen clip the wires heading to my house. That's when I usually put in the earplugs (even though I always come out with my hands up, I hate bullhorns; they make me panicky).

In America if the internet goes out I'm on the phone with Comcast within thirty seconds demanding status updates, assuring them that yes, I've restarted my computer, my router and my modem in all applicable combinations and would they just freaking get the green lights blinking again? It's different here in China. Sure, there's a phone number I can call, and through the combination of pressing random numbers and pounding the phone on my head I can usually get someone on the line to yell at, but at that point, my terse demanding tone is exactly that, only it's in a language that's mostly foreign to the operator unless, especially as the situation escalates, he or she was an English major and had attended a graduate-level course in "The Art of Swearing, Level 2: Fuck You Fucking Motherfuckers."