But still there was some good action in the street. There were some fireworks -- nothing hugely explosive like on Christmas, more pretty fireworks like the following:
Less fun, but more ethereally beautiful, are the paper lanterns that they light and launch. We saw one flying overhead on Christmas, but people were lighting lots of them on New Year's Eve. The following pic doesn't really show the lantern, but it shows how many people were standing around out on the street at 12:10 or so on January 1:
The next picture shows the paper lantern being lit. These are really simple devices -- just paper, with some sort of very lightweight frame, something that lets them place a small candle in the center. So they light the candle, and the lantern basically turns into a hot air balloon -- the hot air from the candle burning is enough to launch the lantern. The lantern lifts up very gently, and then rises to about, oh, 50-75 feet, and kind of floats along on the breeze. It's really quite lovely. I tried to get pictures of the lanterns floating overhead, but they were too small and blurry. So here's a picture of people lighting and preparing to launch a lantern:
Now, you might think, sounds risky -- a candle in the middle of a paper lantern. How is it that the paper doesn't just catch on fire. Well, guess what -- sometimes it does. But since this is Argentina, and they have a definitely more blase' attitude about risk than the gringos, no one gets too worried. In fact they seem to enjoy the spectacle:
This last picture is good to see in the larger size -- you can see how much everyone is enjoying the spectacle. As always, click on the small pic to see a larger one.
In all, it was quite the lovely spectacle, people lighting and launching these paper lanterns. Much sweeter than the homemade pipe bombs that people were lighting and tossing into the street on Christmas Eve!
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