FIREWORKS!

We celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Chinese communist party. It was a national holiday, and I dutifully celebrated by working all day. At night, we went to the harbor and saw fireworks. Two things were immediately apparent:

1. The Chinese know how to put on a fireworks show. I’m telling you, the show was RIDICULOUS! They were spelling letters with fireworks. I was truly impressed. The show was fired off of four ships and synchronized – you wouldn’t believe it if I told you how much fireworks they burst. After all was said and done, I said a prayer for the ozone layer… you should have seen the level of smoke.
2. The Chinese are incredibly skilled at disbursing crowds with amazing speed. There was a sea of people where we were, yet we were able to get to the other side of the island in fifteen minutes. It was shocking. After that episode, I noticed that this was the case with wherever we went. They have unbelievable crowd control.
   
   

Some other thoughts: when we got back to the hotel, we had to present some revisions to the client, which we stayed up until 3:30am doing. While working, I had the TV on and caught up on what the parade looked like during the day. It’s fascinating to see the military march with their power. They polished their missiles and marched with them, along with their tanks, and other displays of their military might. They even had two jets refuel in mid-air. You’ll never see something like that in the west, and it was almost surreal, since most of the images of this sort of propaganda lends itself to the 70s or early 80s. Very cool. After exhausting ourselves, I went to bed with my model in perfect shape.

Waking up in the morning, I started creating some slides on explaining the revisions and results of the model. To my surprise, something didn’t quite add up and the model was not yielding the results I thought. After frantically spending 15 minutes trying to figure it out, it turned out that all was well, and that it was working. Scary none the less, since we were presenting first thing in the morning.