2006 is here, and for the second year in a row I’ve spent the beginning of the new year in Europe.  Last year it was Paris, and this year it was Stuttgart, and our Stuttgart experience was about 100 times more pleasant than it was in Paris.

Rebecca and I just had a quiet night and watched fireworks from our living room, from which we can see nearly the entire downtown of Stuttgart.

It was surprisingly amazing to watch, as there were literally hundreds of individual shows going up all over the city simultaneously. There wasn’t a city-sponsored official fireworks show, and so the Germans all went out and bought what appeared to be huge fireworks (the kind that would be illegal back home). I’m usually not in awe over fireworks, but watching nearly every street corner light up made the city look like it was the middle of a war zone. The sound was ridiculously loud, and after a few minutes it was clear that we had to close our window or else we’d have bottle rockets fly into our living room. Within 30 minutes, the previously clear night that allowed us to see the entire city was turned into a fog that seemed to have creeped in, and the smell of sulfur was unavoidable.

It was a pretty neat experience, and I tried to take as many pictures from our closed windows as I could without getting hit. I’ll try to get them online as soon as we get Internet access at the apartment again.