Wednesday, January 1, 2014

New Year's Eve in Berlin - Happy New Year!


We spent New Year’s Eve in Berlin with friends.  We walked to a hill near their house at midnight and watched the fireworks from throughout the city.  Nothing was organized but people were out everywhere shooting off fireworks.  A shroud of smoke hung in the air.  It seemed like s scene out of Clockwork Orange…World War III…the end of the world.  The sound of the fireworks was deafening, like a monsoon on a tin roof.  An ancient pagan ritual in the middle of modernity meant to banish the evil spirits of the past year to the nether regions of the subconscious.  It was incredible experience…ordered and purposeful chaos.  When we walked back to the house, people appeared like zombies out of the smoke.  It was a totally surrealistic scene out of Dante’s Inferno or grade B horror movie.  I kept expecting the fireworks to end…10 minutes…30 minutes…an hour.  When I went to bed at 1 am, the fireworks were undiminished in intensity.  

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