It’s been two years since we’ve been in Leipzig for the annual New Year’s Eve celebration and we thought we would post about it to let you all know about the experience. In Germany, the term for New Year’s Eve is Silvester and it resembles a war zone, just with prettier explosions.
A little less than a week ago, the fireworks went on sale everywhere, including the discount grocery stores. That’s right, people were shooting off mortar fireworks that they bought from discount grocery stores…next to the road.
A big difference between our last experience and this one is our view: having moved apartments since then, we now have one balcony that faces a typically busy street and one that looks over a big garden that runs between two lines of apartment buildings. This picture is of a building behind ours, lit up by fireworks.
The front balcony gave me mezzanine seats over some revelers enjoying their Silvester celebration. Notice the fireworks in the background. There are no parks back there. People are shooting those off from between buildings and on sidewalks.
For those of you who were not aware, the type of firework that comes on a stick and shoots straight up off the stick is called (in America) a bottle rocket. Why? Because you use a bottle to hold it up to avoid getting hurt. And what could hurt you? The sparks and flames shooting out of the back end of the rocket. These people used their hands. I guess that makes them hand rockets? And they just might have hit our building with one of these hand rockets.
And then there’s this guy, who decided to put his face right where the sparks go.
And after all these pyrotechnicians are finished shooting their rockets and blowing things up, they head home. No cleaning up. No kicking everything to the side. The view around the city is the same: everyone's trash is right where they dropped it after they shot off the rocket. The sidewalks are lined with bottle rocket sticks, fire cracker paper and empty champagne bottles.
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