sean brendan

Here is an interesting excerpt from my brother Brett’s blog. He is teaching in China this year, and this is part of the Christmas Eve experience.

Anyway, we had to go to the downtown of my district and the streets were absolutely flooded with people… the whole city was out - probably what it feels like in New York on New Years. China’s already crowded but this was something else. The energy was cool, I like busy places sometimes. When we got down to the Three Gorges Square (kind of a Times Square like place) there were tons and tons of people just beating each other with these blow up bats and hammers. They also like the silly string and aerosol snow flakes. Being white, I of course was a huge target and would just get hit and sprayed from random people everywhere. I wish I could have taped the scene, it was so bizarre! Huge mobs of people would just suddenly start moving in no particular direction, swinging their plastic toys at each other. Kind of cool, but so damn weird. I was thinking, what if some crazy guy just took a real bat into the crowds and let out some kind of pent-up psycho rage on everyone? I didn’t feel all that safe myself… the way the packs moved could trample someone easily. Some student told me that a person or people had died last year. I felt like Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog when he was making fun of Star Wars geeks banging their toy lightsabers around… “And now the nerds are congregating for the ceremonial banging of the plastic toys.”

Check out his blog - Chongqing Bloggin’