Our Own Fireworks...

Growing up, my Mum always said "You can never have too many fireworks and they can never be too big"... or something like that. I may have misunderstood her, but it seems like a good rule, so I am going to give her credit for the enormous fireworks show we put on. Thanks Mum.


After seeing the fireworks display on Thursday and Chinese New Year came to a close, we decided with some friends to put on a show of our own. Thankfully after the Chinese New Year ended there were many stores still selling fireworks, and a lot less Chinese people interested in buying them... so this means FIREWORKS for sale at a DISCOUNT!!!, which is pretty much awesome. And luckily for us, we have 10 or so friends here whose mothers also raised them with the right rules about fireworks.... 


So Saturday morning our friends Matt his daughter Sloan, Chris, Beth and I headed out to make a purchase along with the financial backing of James and Susy, and Charles and Denise.The purchasing experience itself was pretty amazing. We were in a room that was stacked wall to wall and floor to ceiling with fireworks. Matt's driver, Tiger, was our negotiator, and he and the woman who owned the place were going back and forth for quite some time. There was a fair amount of cursing and and she hit Tiger quite a lot. All in all we had $400 USD to spend and we did quite well, I think. We came out with 13 big boxes of fireworks, along with what Tiger picked up as we were walking out telling the lady that "this is part of our discount."  This comment resulted in him getting hit again, but she could not have been too mad as she lent us her van to take the fireworks home.

Here is Tiger Surveying the inventory in the store.

This is our purchase stacked in the office of Matt & Kris's complex's security office. The security guards were happy to hold them for us over night. The presence of a few hundred pounds of fireworks did not seem to prevent them from smoking in the office at all.

Matt and Tiger getting things ready

We set the show up in the road outside the complex. By "in the road" I mean it was literally in the lane of traffic and a car headed south would need to move into the north bound lane to pass our fireworks.
This was Tiger and the guards idea... we just went with it.

The view down the street... 

To give you an idea of the scale of our munitions... 

Looking back across the road at our set-up... you can clearly see the center line and we are near it. 

It was quite foggy out so it made taking pictures a little hard. 

Tanya all bundled up and before she put her safety goggles on. One of the guards children behind her is shielding his ears. 

Tiger lighting the first one

People kept driving through our fireworks... can't they see we are trying to put on a show here... how rude

One of the best shots of one exploding

Another rude driver... 

Us with our safety gear on. Safety goggles were a necessity.

While our show wasn't exactly as magnificent as the Dalian show we went to a few days before, I have to admit it was better than many fireworks shows I've been to in Canada or the U.S. and it was all for about 400 U.S. dollars.

Chinese New Year & Lantern Festival

The Chinese certainly love their fireworks... we have mentioned that fireworks go off at all hours, but that is nothing compared to what happens during Chinese Lunar New Year and the Lantern Festival. The Chinese New Year festival begins on the first day of the first month in the traditional Chinese calendar and ends with Lantern Festival which is on the 15th day. (There is a lot of information on Wikipedia about the festival, if you want to learn more.) 

The main thing you notice about the festival is the fireworks. The main shows presented by the city are on the 1st day of Chinese New Year and the last day of the Lantern Festival with the local people doing their best to fill every second in between with their own fireworks. We missed a lot of the fireworks since we were in the U.S. for most of the Chinese New Year celebration, but we did get back in time to see the finale. The fireworks put anything I have ever seen before to shame. Honestly, I think there may have been more fireworks going off in Xinghai Square, where we were, than in all fireworks shows I have ever seen before in my life. It was truly amazing. The show lasted about 30 min and never let down for a second. 

This was taken from our bedroom window during the Chinese New Year Celebration. The launch site for this firework was the sidewalk outside the building, and the explosion went off around the 8th floor, so I am shooting up at it a little from our 5th floor apt. 

Here is  a video from the show. (It gets really crazy around 1:40 into the video.)

We were about 800yds away from the launch site so we could get a full view. We picked our spot based on seeing ~40 Chinese people with professional cameras lined up in one area. I think they picked a good location. 

Here is where some scale is needed. The 3 big bursts you see here would be "Big Ones" the kind that most US or Canadian shows only shoot off one at a time in between smaller ones. At the bottom of each of these, there are 3 more about to explode, and on the ground there are an additional 3 about to launch. They would "Stack" 9 or more of these going off at once in a 15 second period. In the US this would be at least 5min worth of fireworks. 

Here again you can see, well I can't count, but 10 or 12 big fireworks going off at once...
I am not joking here, this explosion is easily 400yd wide and each one is as big as any individual fire work you have ever seen. 

Here we have 11 going off, right on top of the remains of the last 10+ fireworks as they fall from the sky

This one shot probably has more fire works going off than some entire shows.

-35C in Harbin

This post is a little behind, but the weekend of the January 15th we flew north to Harbin with our friends Leon & Kevin, to the northern most major city in China. Harbin is famous for quite a few different things:

1) It is horribly cold, I am talking Edmonton, Canada & Minnesota level cold. The warm days were -25C (-13F) and the coldest we saw was -35C (-31F). 

2) Sausages, but honestly they are nothing special, but they sure do smell. 

3) The Snow Sculpture Contest

4) The Ice Festival

5) The worlds largest tiger preserve with more than 800 Siberian (Manchurian) tigers. 

We arrived Friday night and checked into the Shangri-La hotel, it was about 10:00 p.m. so we opted for a drink in the hotel bar, which happens to be made almost entirely of ice. This was a good starter for us as it was only -10C (14F) inside the bar, and it let us start to acclimatize a little. 

Saturday morning the temp had dropped to -30C (-22F) and it was off to the snow sculpture competition. The carvings were incredibly detailed, and some of them where absolutely gigantic. The competition pieces were all carved from a ~3x3x3m (~10x10x10f) cube of snow. 

We spent about 3hrs wandering around the competition until we were extremely cold. We then headed into town. We just kind of walked around in town and did not find much exciting except a bar called "Star _ucks" which had apparently lost a fight w/ a coffee company of similar name... who knew they had copyrights here. 

After a quick bite we headed back to the hotel to try to bring our core temperatures up for the Ice festival that evening. 

A balmy -10C inside the Ice Palace bar... 

Tanya & Leon on ice benches... they did have fake fur seat covers though

Blue Ribbon Beer... AKA Pabst Blue Ribbon. Only $103 USD per bottle. That is not a typo, they have re-branded in China and apparently are making a killing.  

Tanya resting on the ice piano

All bundled up at the snow sculpture competition

It was "roman" themed... that did not make this sculpture of Romulus and Remus any less creepy

I was dancing a little (and seriously, I was sober... weird) 

Kevin and I getting strapped into a Zorb... 

And this is us getting pushed down a the hill in said Zorb

The sculptures were huge... 

They carved the side of the snow pile we zorb'd down.

Tanya on the tube

Those black specks near the head? yeah that is like 5 guys trying to finish the sculpture. 

Kevin and I driving these things... for some reason the girls did not want to ride shotgun... 

This was my favorite by far. the detail was incredible. You really need to double click this one to see the full detail in the big shot. 

Somehow this one won the competition... must be the judges brother or something

This is one of the saws they use to cut the ice for the Ice Festival

After a dip in the hot tub at the hotel we piled into a cab to go to the Ice Festival. Pulling up to the entrance gate was almost overwhelming. I was expecting it to be big, but this was kind of insane; the wall was about 40 feet high and a few hundred meters long. The gate itself was easily 80 feet tall. Little did we know as we walked up to pay our way in ($75/person, which seemed way to high given the number of Chinese there. But they were all showing passports and it looked like they were getting a discount) that this would be one of the smaller things we would see. 

Me eating frozen strawberries on a stick... probably would have been good, but it was so frozen solid it was hard as a rock. 

From Left to Right: Leon, Random Chinese man who wanted to have his picture taken with the girls, Tanya

This was one of the main structures... had to be 150 feet tall. This needs to be seen in a full size picture.  

The entrance gate... this was about 80 feet tall and 200m long

You need to see this one full size (double click the photo)... 

Tanya riding a yak... obviously

Sunday morning we checked out of the hotel and piled into a cab once again for a visit to the Harbin Tiger Park. The park is home to over 800 adult tigers which are intended to be reintroduced into the wild. Somehow I don't think that will really work as they seem a little to accustom to getting chickens and goats tossed to them. Unfortunately for us, China banned feeding live animals to predators by tourists the week before our visit so instead of getting a chicken tided to a stick, I had to pay a zoo keeper to throw a chicken out of his car for me to watch. We'll have to go back later when the loop hole is discovered that allows us to feed the tigers directly again. 

The tigers have it pretty good here or so it seems. The park is few hundred acres of large pens, each about 10 acres. In each pen there are about 8-10 tigers. They have plenty of room to move around, and on a regular basis chickens are randomly thrown in for them to eat. 

The tour is in buses which moves from pen to pen. Unfortunately for me, tigers means bars on the windows a little closer together than the width of my camera lens, and 25 people on a bus built for 15 means fogged glass... so my pics did not turn out really well. Fortunately Kevin got some real gems, so I am reposting them w/ full credit to him. 

Tiger fight... (Photo by Kevin) 

Sitting to jumping to the roof of a toyota 4runner in one smooth motion. It did not even look like the tiger was trying and it happened so fast. (Photo by Kevin) 

The chickens face says it all (Photo by Kevin) 

(Photo by Kevin)

MMMM Chicken

They are not malnourished