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.