Ringing in the year of the golden pig

I arrived in Beijing last Saturday, and it was immediately obvious that things would be a bit chaotic. My three other buddies and I piled into a cab, and heard the occasional thundering boom that kept increasing in loudness and intensity as we inched closer to the center of the city. As we got out of our cab, it sounded like a war zone due to all the fireworks, and it was still four hours until sunset.
We checked into our 5 star hotel ($60 a night per room) and did the Tiananmen Square bit, and watched the changing of the guard and retiring of the flag at sunset. Then, it was time to go for a feed and blow shit up ourselves.

Rather than an official government display of fireworks, people get together and blow shit up - wherever the hell they want, as you'll see in the picture. Firecrackers are torched in units of a thousand, and it is good luck to set them off near the front of your house since it wards off evil spirits and whatnot.

Hanging out between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City was especially surreal at midnight, when there was all kinda of colorful shit exploding in every direction.

What is usually the year of the pig is the year of the "golden pig" in 2007, with the year for gold and pig coinciding as it does every sixty years. This is an especially lucky thing, fortuitous even more for babies born in this year, since, as a student explained to me, "peegs have many babies."

For New Year's Day proper, we went to the Wall, where I had a "Holy shit, I'm on the Great Wall of (fucking) China" moment.