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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 1 January 2006 (Day View) – A New Year Begins

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01.01.2006 – Sunday 1 January – The Year of Work

Dawn

• I woke up to the new year when some Tibetans began chanting, finding myself lying with hundreds of other people on a hilltop, and the dawn just beginning to break. After watching the sunrise over the horizon, I went back to sleep, waking again when it got too hot, and carrying my camping mat back to the tent, waiting in a queue for ages, finally having a quick shower, and rushing down to the shop to prepare for the first eight thirty shirt.

8:30am

• Surprisingly, the shop was busier today than any other day. I guess all the people who hadn’t yet bought anything now were.

Noon

• Bronwen and I finished work around the same time, and spent the rest of the day watching random acts, culminating in the closing ceremony. The closing fire ceremony was quite spectacular. Thousands of people camped out at the natural amphitheatre, with nothing happening for quite some time. Eventually, an aboriginal made fire with sticks, lighting a torch, which then lit an explosive fuse that ran instantaneously up a wooded hill, setting off fireworks. Then, in the resulting gloom, an unrealistically large, spectacularly close moon was seen slowly progressing across the sky, eventually revealing itself as an earth, coming to rest to our left as thousands of lit paper-lamps walked across our field of vision, not doing a great deal. A plethora of strange oversized lit paper constructions, and numerous fire things, along with music from the stage, filled in the gap until a large trebuchet fired a flare at a large sun and moon construction, which turned out to be full of various fireworks, burning dramatically until all that was left was a pile of sparks.