New Year's Eve is not much of a celebration over here. There are no parties and no fireworks. The highlight is seeing a crystal ball drop on Times Square in New York. It is a 100 year old tradition, but these days the ball is heavily sponsored. It is made out of 672 Waterford crystal triangles, and 9,576 Philips Luxeon LEDs replacing 600 incandescent and halogen bulbs of the previous Ball. The new Ball is more than twice as bright and capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million vibrant colors and billions of patterns. Yet, the entire Times Square Ball will be lit with approximately the same amount of electricity as it takes to power ten toasters. I love light bulbs.
Due to the time difference, I saw the crystal ball drop at 11 pm. Luckily, the local tv stations repeated the whole event at midnight. For a moment, it seemed that New York and Dallas were in the same time zone. Even though the naked cowboy definitely lives in New York and not in Dallas.
Ina even experienced two new year's eves. The first one on a flight from Jakarta to Tokyo. She is currently on a flight from Tokyo to Dallas. It left Tokyo around 1 pm on January 1. En route, she crossed the date line which bumped her back into 2007. She'll be back in 2008 in a couple of hours.
Happy New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment