New Year's Day Aftermath

I'm glad somebody gave us a heads-up on this one.

New Year's Eve in Germany is a bit like the Fourth of July in the USA and as such, celebrated (in these parts anyways) with high-dollar amateur fireworks, bordering on professional level quality, some of them quite impressive. But the place was a war-zone, and seeing as these pyrotechnics are completely legal, there's not much for the local cops to do other than make sure everybody's safe. To start the night off, we had a brief run-in with our usually drunk, and always batshit-crazy neighbor just before we left for the evening, then a pleasant dinner out with a friend before the 3 of us set out to the castle wall to get a bird's eye view of the city from one of its highest points. All day long there were fireworks and explosions being set off with increasing frequency as midnight approached. As we left the restaurant, it seemed like every block had a group of folks who were indiscriminately setting off some serious firepower, sometimes pointing it at each other (and passerby) for snicks. It's times like this I feel like I do when riding in a NYC taxi with a driver who doesn't know the traffic laws and drives at twice the speed limit-- could get seriously hurt, but I can't really do much, so may as well relax, laugh and enjoy the show. We got to the castle walls, and everybody there went predictably nuts at the stroke of midnight just like any New Year celebration, but in 22-degree weather. And it was a sight-- all corners of this medieval city were alight with fireworks, and it was going pretty solid until 1:00am, when we packed it in, went home and watched TV until almost 3:00am just to calm down and allow the ringing in our ears to subside.

On New Year's Day almost everything was closed, but we found out that all of the fireworks enthusiasts hadn't bothered to clean up after themselves-- the city was a mess, and even now on the 5th, there are still plenty of wrappers and paper on the streets-- these pics are really quite mild representations of the hundreds of pounds of trash and mess in our neighborhood alone. Next year (providing we'll be around-- there's already talk of us fleeing the city, er, make that the country for New Years), we'll be even better prepared to deal with this-- stuff like garage the car and wear earplugs to bed. Our first German New Years was an eye opener to be sure.