Bonfire Night

 So this was my first Bonfire Night....Guy Faulks Day.....whatever you want to call it, in England! One thing that is really different from in the US is that people are allowed to fire off fireworks without a permit as long as it is on their own property! It was also the Hindu festival of light, Diwali. This means that for the last two weeks people all around my neighborhood have been firing them off from about 6pm to 11pm every night.  Bonfire Night was high intensity on the fireworks and the church around the corner was ringing their bells for around 3 hours straight! I did not actually do anything Bonfire Night, but the next night my university was hosting a fireworks display and fun fair, so Andrea and I went to that!

Now, I have been in my fair share of crowds. I have been in New York City during the Christmas season! Nothing was compared to this though. Thousands of students were funneling into a tiny space through tiny walkways at a glacial pace. It took so much longer than it should have just to walk there!

Look at all those people! It was shoulder to shoulder the entire time and you could not move without have to shove someone out of the way!

The funfair was decent. There were four rides that you had to pay 2.50 to get onto. I think there might have been games and refreshments too, but we never made it that far. There was one ride called "Miami Fever", which we got a kick out of.


 Andrea and I decided we only wanted to go on one ride....this glorious creature! It swung back and forth while spinning you around. When I was younger I used to go to a theme park in upstate New York every summer, and I always went for the biggest and the baddest rides in the park! This happened to be the best one at this fair.

I also ran into some friends I had made on the hike from a few weekends ago while we waited online. It was really nice to see them again! Now right as we were about to get on the ride after waiting for 20 min or so....the fireworks started. Then...it started to rain! This led to one of the coolest experiences I have ever had on a theme park ride in my life! Every time we sung into the sky we could see the fireworks in front of us, the rain was pelting us in the face, and we we screaming our heads off! I also may have been maniacally laughing, but that is just something I do when I am really nervous.

After we got off the ride we watched the rest of the fireworks. They were pretty good! We were standing right underneath where they were being shot off, so occasionally we would get hit by the debris! After that we tried to get home. I say tried quite literally. We walked over to the bridge we had crossed to get in, and somehow managed to get stuck on it for fifteen minutes! There was a huge crowd of people crammed don it and for some reason we were not moving. I still don't know what was blocking us! Eventually we got frustrated and left to find another way out. We did, and when we got to the other side of the stream we still did not see what was blocking the people on the bridge! Even once we got out of the fun fair we still had to walk back through campus in a huge crowd of people. It was a relief to get out of there an into the open!

Despite the crowd issues, it was a lot of fun! That one ride was one of the most unique experiences of my life and I doubt I will ever have another one like it!