COBBlog

Frohes neues Jahr! (Happy New Year!) I hope all of you had a wonderful New Years and were able to celebrate the new year coming with a bang! I celebrated the going out of 2007 and the coming in of 2008 here in Jena with one of my roommates, Christian.

The tradition in Germany is to light of fireworks at midnight, a bit like our Fourth of July. Christian and I cooked dinner in our flat and then went out on the town watching people set off fireworks right from the road! It was crazy how many people were setting off firecrackers and smaller fireworks and it was only 10:30pm!! After walking for a bit, we found an organ concert in the evangelical church in the city. What a way to say goodbye to 2007-in peace with wonderful music from a church organ. Can’t get much better than that! After the concert we had about half an hour to get back up to our flat to watch the fireworks out of Christian’s window. We figured it would be the best place to watch them from since we live on a hill on the top floor and his window overlooks the city.

We made it back to the parking lot of our building as everyone outside started counting down “5..4..3..2..1..Frohes neues Jahr!” Christian and I took off running up the many steps to our flat and made it to his room, tore off our jackets and whipped out our cameras to try to capture the excitement of the city ablaze with fireworks. Everywhere you looked there were fireworks going off. No matter how hard we tried, we just could not capture the mood of the moment on our cameras.

The city literally looked as though it were on fire from all the fireworks. I could not believe there were so many! And it wasn’t like they lasted a few minutes…the fireworks went on for a good 45 minutes! It was amazing! Talk about celebrating with a BANG! We also say paper balloons up in the air. They, too are a tradition here, though Christian was not quite sure what they signified. They were red balloons about a mile or so up in the sky with candles lit inside them. Gorgeous!! I hope you all have a wonderful 2008! Good luck in the New Year!☺

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 6:06 am and is filed under Heather '09. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.