新年快樂 (Happy New Year!)

Street parties are much rarer in Taiwan. The atmosphere in public is overall more controlled. Neither loud public music nor alcohol are very common. There are many advantages, of course. Taipei is safe and clean. But I do miss a certain exuberance I learned to love in South America and Southern Europe. (You can find it in Germany if you come during the summer months or for the Christmas Markets!)

I love this photo for how it shows how quickly any general observations such as the above crumbles down. Sure, it was a special day, New Year’s Eve 2021 to 2022. And compared to the war-like conditions I’m used to from Berlin the celebrations were still temperate. But it’s hard to miss the joy of this group of young man, and other groups weren’t necessarily more reluctant to share their joy.

(I cropped the image and did some color editing to clean the image. I thought of being more aggressive – the blues for example don’t add much, they even steer more attention to the boy who is already distracting from the main group. But at the end I decided against an overly cinematic edit.)