I said CEASE FIRE!!.......please?

What gets me are the 8am fireworks. It’s not even dark. Who gets up to do that? WHO?

Today is the Lantern Festival.
What I know about the Lantern Festival:
Everyone eats sticky rice balls filled with bean paste and there are a lot of fireworks--- all. day. long. From where I am sitting in the computer room, there could very well be golf ball sized hail falling on our ‘tin roof’, while drummers from a high school marching band practice in the living room and hundreds of small Chinese children are throwing handfuls of gravel at our windows. Can’t leave out the pirate ships run aground in the courtyard firing canons over the apartment building.

Surprisingly, fireworks are not the main attraction of the Lantern Festival; Lanterns are. We followed a crowd out the North gate of campus, and under a red archway where the crowd thickened considerably. Big crowds feel like an out of body experience to me. I become a zombie, rhythmically moving forward with the mass. I feel like I don’t even control my own legs; we, as a herd, share one brain. Josh, on the other hand, feels very alert in a big crowd; one hand clutching wallet in pocket, other hand tethering zombie girlfriend, eyes darting every which way. Eventually the combination of dense crowd + deafening fireworks became too much and we ducked into an alley that took us around the campus and up to the South gate. Not before we got a few blurry pictures.










Bei Bei Jing Jing Huan Huan Yin Yin Ni Ni