![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Forneldarnas Natt
2 Sep 2019 09:15 pmSo the whole Baltic region was celebrating this holiday to commemorate ancient maritime signal fires on Saturday night, and that includes our new home town of Pargas. There's a bit of a procession of slow, small motor boats down the canal, and they drift around in the water for a bit and then somebody lights a bonfire that is floating out on the water. People mill around at the visitors' harbor and along the shore for the view - too many people for me really, although it wasn't all crowded like a street festival or anything.
I got cold (sea wind off the water is def. colder than the predicted temp in the weather app) and we started walking home eventually, so the fireworks went off at 10 pm when we were most of the way home, but it turned out that by staying on the main street we were still able to hustle down a bit and see them in between two buildings. The budget was clearly not that large, because these were much smaller fireworks than the kind you see at New Year's or July 4th - albeit the same kind, but they just don't go nearly as high. They were only a little bit above the horizon, so if you weren't close to the shore they would have been obscured by trees and buildings.
This event was a bit amusing to observe because Pargas is so small (around 15k, but the population density is only ~17 per km2 because it's geographically very spread out around over a ton of tiny islands in the inner archipelago) and their busy events are also quaintly tiny. The signal fire itself was cooler in theory than practice: it did look cool, but, well, it was kind of far away and it was cold and. I just generally was not in a good enough frame of mind to be enchanted anymore at that point. Perhaps in the future, by dressing more warmly and making sure to limit my exposure to crowds and noise by arriving later and choosing a better observation point, I will be able to appreciate it more. But the walk home got my blood moving again, and it was much nicer to watch the fireworks away from the crowds.
I got cold (sea wind off the water is def. colder than the predicted temp in the weather app) and we started walking home eventually, so the fireworks went off at 10 pm when we were most of the way home, but it turned out that by staying on the main street we were still able to hustle down a bit and see them in between two buildings. The budget was clearly not that large, because these were much smaller fireworks than the kind you see at New Year's or July 4th - albeit the same kind, but they just don't go nearly as high. They were only a little bit above the horizon, so if you weren't close to the shore they would have been obscured by trees and buildings.
This event was a bit amusing to observe because Pargas is so small (around 15k, but the population density is only ~17 per km2 because it's geographically very spread out around over a ton of tiny islands in the inner archipelago) and their busy events are also quaintly tiny. The signal fire itself was cooler in theory than practice: it did look cool, but, well, it was kind of far away and it was cold and. I just generally was not in a good enough frame of mind to be enchanted anymore at that point. Perhaps in the future, by dressing more warmly and making sure to limit my exposure to crowds and noise by arriving later and choosing a better observation point, I will be able to appreciate it more. But the walk home got my blood moving again, and it was much nicer to watch the fireworks away from the crowds.
