Karen's Millennium Photos
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." - REM
New Year's Eve, 1999 - between fireworks shows.
Between the 9pm and midnight fireworks displays, the Harbor Parade of Lights came by. The Parade of Lights consisted of 12-15 lighted floats representing different sea creatures. Each float was about 2 or 3 stories high and had been paid for by a corporate sponsor. Two of the floats are pictured below. The white light at the bottom right of each float is a sign that has the name of the sponsor on it - we couldn't read those though. There were a couple of people driving each float - for scale, the people were only slightly taller than the white sponsor signs.
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Meanwhile, the high-priced party at the Opera House was raging, and they had the building lit up in multi-colors which changed continuously.
We could also see the shadows (not in the photo) of some sort of acrobatic dance performace on the Opera House "sails," where the performers were hanging from bungie cords and bouncing around.
All evening, as Andrew and I waited for midnight, we had counted off the other countries that hit midnight before Australia (which wasn't many!). We'd watch our watches and say "Oh! Fiji just switched over! Happy New Year to them!" or "It's the new millenium in New Zealand - I wonder if they still have electricity!"
