I saw an interesting video blog on making carbonated fruit ( http://www.instructables.com/id/EZETHSWF1B3RB5H/ ), and decided to go scrounge around for some supplies to make some.

My went to the hardware store, and I bought a mason jar (in general, not a good idea to use glass for this project), because all the sturdy plastic containers were really expensive. In the demonstration I saw, they used a nalgene. I then went downtown with a friend, and on our way back, we stopped at Baskin Robbins and bought some ice cream and dry ice. Back home, threw some fruit in the jar with some dry ice, put it in a cloth bag (to hopefully reduce/elliminate any shrapnel, and stuck it in the fridge.

There was one… extra opportunity. You don’t need very much dry ice for the fruit, and so we had some left over. I may have called up some friends and may have asked them to collect their plastic bottles and meet me. We may have set off some dry ice bombs.

They’re relatively harmless, and in a country that doesn’t seem to regulate fireworks very strictly, it seemed like a pretty safe thing. With plastic bottles, you typically get only a couple pieces of shrapnel, but the bark is worse than the bite. A dry ice bomb is essentially putting dry ice into a plastic bottle (use gloves - dry ice can burn you) and add water to speed up the process (dry ice sublimes, giving off copious amounts of CO2; adding water makes it sublime faster by increasing the heat around the dry ice). Place cap on tight and throw. The ones we made took several minutes to explode, and some of them needed a little extra something. Some people enjoy shooting these with BBs for that little last activation energy, but lacking one, we decided to throw these against the concrete. We had a couple interesting moments when we didn’t throw them far enough away from the group, and it just flew straight up and straight back down. We had a couple explode in our hands, too (it wasn’t too bad; I wouldn’t recommend trying to make this happen, however).

With our last one, we apparently upset someone, and we heard someone yell very loudly at us in Japanese. We ran off, but one person in our group lost his kippah when jumping a fence, and so we needed to go back. I went down to get it, and the others kept a lookout from one of our apartments. I was about halfway there when they called me back, saying that the guy who yelled at us was walking around. We decided to ride our bikes past the scene, and as we did, there was a middle-aged man walking with the guy who yelled at us, holding a baseball bat. As we neared him, he held it up threateningly - and we were just passers-by!

About an hour later they stopped looking and we were able to get it back, but who the hell brings a baseball bat for hearing a boom? Granted, it could be a little freaky, but a baseball bat?