Birthday fireworks

Giselle arrived yesterday. She has a lot of family living in Mendoza and they immediately invited us over for lunch and to her cousin (I think) Mauro's 12th birthday party. It started around 9pm and was still going strong when we left at about 1am.

For me, the most notable part of the birthday party (besides the fantastic empanadas, of which I ate probably three too many), was the lighting of the candle on the birthday cake. You are probably envisioning a young boy being presented with a cake that had a candle looking something like this:

At least that is more or less what I would have envisioned.

But, in fact, the single red candle on the cake looked like one of these:

That is, the pointy triangular part was embedded in the cake and a red "candle" rose to at least 4 inches tall.

Just moments before they lit the Mauro's candle, I remarked to Giselle that it looked a lot like the fireworks that we used to send off on in Georgia for the 4th of July.

To my surprise, as soon as the "candle" had been lit, I realized that it was basically a baby (or adolescent?) firework:

Here it is a live action shot, although not of Mauro because unfortunately I had not brought my camera.

I have never seen one of these in the U.S., but maybe some of you have?

At one point young Mauro tried to blow it out, but it was going way too strong!