We welcomed the new year in on the bank of the Main river, right in the heart of Frankfurt. Germany takes New Year's Eve seriously, and although the excitement for the new year is the same in the USA and Germany, how people celebrate is very different from anything she experienced growing up.
Germany loves fireworks. For the three days before New Year's Eve, fireworks are sold in supermarkets and other stores. People buy, buy, buy. Fireworks, in this sense, include everything from small poppers and sparklers to larger rockets that fly into the night and burst, just like in a professional firework show.
Where she grew up in California, fireworks were banned. This is certainly not true for the entire USA, but for everywhere she has lived. Cities often put on their own professional shows (or people head to larger cities like SF to watch the fireworks there), but individuals cannot purchase or use fireworks. The town directly next to her town did allow the selling/use of fireworks, but compared to the fireworks sold in the Germany, these were quite small.
This year the sky above the river Main was lit up, just like the sky over all German towns on New Year's Eve. The first fireworks were set off more than an hour before midnight and the rockets continued, numbering hundreds at once at midnight, until almost one in the morning. We joined the fun with our own celebrations (meter-long sparklers for the girls and rockets for the guys).
Unfortunately, we were too busy celebrating to get any good pictures. Here is a picture right from where we were last night taken by Andreas Arnold for the Frankfurter Rundschau.
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| Andreas Arnold - Frankfurter Rundschau |
We hope you enjoyed welcoming the new year in from wherever in the world you were and we wish you a very happy and prosperous 2013!
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