New Year’s Eve here is called Silvestr.
The 31st of December is his Saint’s day, so he has become quite famous here.

Anyway there are thousands upon thousands of people in the streets between Christmas and Silvestr. They come from all over Europe for affordable all-night partying (and apparently fireworks as I later learned.)

So I heard that there were fireworks in the city for Silvestr.
Then I started to hear stories of how on the first of the year, the news is filled with body counts like:
16 fingers, 2 hands, 6 toes, 7 eyes…
I wondered what went on that so many people got hurt on Silvestr.

Then about 4 o’clock (a half hour before sunset) I started to hear explosions in the streets. And I’m not talking M-80’s. I’m talking about ones that sound like heavy artillery. (I actually hear some still going off now at noon on the first.)

Apparently the Czechs like their fireworks.

So by midnight (maybe as early as 11, but we were inside) people were shooting mortar fireworks off throughout the city. If you grouped 25 of these fireworks together and shot them off in the US, you would have a reasonable fireworks show for a town of 50,000 people.

Well, each person shooting them had 5 or 10 mortars and my conservative guess is there were between 3 and 5 thousand people shooting them off around the city. We climbed to the old high castle and highway near our apartment and were surrounded by them. On this bridge we were maybe 400 feet higher than the city below and fireworks were going off at eye level and we could see them from miles away across the valleys. It’s pretty hard to explain how impressive it was. They weren’t all the biggest or coolest fireworks I had ever seen, though there were a couple super cool huge ones.

What was so amazing was their extent. Just very cool.

Hope everyone had a nice Silvestr celebration, and
good luck and happiness in the new year!!

-cory and veronika.