NorthSouthEastWest: Expat Dispatches
It’s fast approaching the end of the year which means we have time for just one more Expat Dispatches for 2011. As always, your faithful expat dispatchers from the four corners of the globe are:
North: Linda (Yours Truly here) in The Netherlands (http://www.adventuresinexpatland.com/)
South: Russell in Australia (http://www.insearchofalifelessordinary.com/)
East: Erica in Japan (http://www.expatriababy.com/)
West: Maria in Canada (http://www.iwasanexpatwife.com/)
The December edition of NorthSouthEastWest is something very dear to our hearts. It’s the thing or things that drive us crazy as expats.
This month’s theme is therefore an open invitation to have a good ole fashioned rant and is called It’s driving me round the bend!
Visiting at In Search of a Life Less Ordinary, Erica shares her (absolute lack of) love for packaging in Japan.
Over at I Was an Expat Wife, I discover the discomfort of discomfort.
While at Expatria, Baby, Maria is breathing a sigh of relief to be free of the expat hierarchy.
And here at Adventures in Expat Land, Russell is wondering ‘why it’s so flamin’ hard to get any sleep around here’.
So sit back, enjoy these four no-holds-barred posts, and look forward to a wonderful festive season wherever in the world you and yours may be!
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I used to be a wonderfully deep sleeper. I’d wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day, confident in having achieved the requisite eight hours of undisturbed kip.
I now wake three hours too early in the morning to the sound of kookaburras cackling like rabid hyenas outside my bedroom window.
(The first time I heard a kookaburra sing, I thought I was being attacked by feral beasts and jumped right out of bed into the arms of my future father-in-law. You don’t need to know why he was in my bedroom. You do need to know that these birds have the potential to scare you witless.)
Kookaburras are impressively large specimens that sing in pairs and that start their singing all too early in the morning.
They also wake up the surrounding native birdlife who join in with their own brand of morning song.
Extremely loudly. Just outside my bedroom window. And three hours too early.
Soon after, the ‘tradies’ hit the road. Carpenters, builders, plumbers, electricians. Anyone with a trade begins work in Australia as soon as the day breaks. Given Sydney’s woeful traffic congestion problems, they usually head off bright and early which, in my neighbourhood, equals 4:30 am.
By now, I’m wide awake. My tin-pot, two-bit house is a proud example of the glory of Australian house building. Homes are uninsulated, sometimes built of wood (like mine), and come without double-glazed windows. (Popular opinion says that double-glazed windows are either a fanciful decoration for the wealthy or a must-have for those that live in the frigid northern hemisphere.)
So not only is my house freezing in winter and a sauna (not a naked one) in summer, but I can readily hear a sparrow fart outside the front door.
I turn up at work strung out and half asleep, incapable of doing anything other than blog posting (that’s my excuse, I’m sticking to it). Whoever said that Australia is the ‘lucky country’ was blatantly wrong.
It is the ‘noisy country’ and it’s driving me round the bend.
Aside from the early morning wake-up calls, I have neighbours who insist on playing with power tools each and every evening. Mr Angle Grinder lives next door. For three years, Angle Grinder has singlehandedly ground the living crap out of Lord-knows-what in his non-soundproofed garage next door. He’s either building a replica of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in his grinding frenzy or he’s just a twisted old man with a sad grinder fetish.
Opposite live the Don’t-give-a-fricks, the family from the bottom-end (as in arse, not South) of the UK who wholeheartedly enjoy life in the land down under and mostly enjoy it late on a Saturday night. I’ve given up asking for the music to be turned down. Now we sit in our front room and watch the TV in time to the Euro techno baseline coming from across the road.
Let’s not forget those pesky birds. At 7pm, they return to haunt me. The lorikeets and cockatoos squawk overhead and the fruit bats swoop from one tree to the next letting forth the most ear curdling of sounds as they do. The possums screech out mating calls, depositing small brown parcels onto our car as they crawl along telephone wires and into the trees. With this cacophony of hoots, shrieks and wails, I often feel like a visitor to the local zoo.
Once the darkness descends on the neighbourhood, you’d assume the noise would also die down. But this is close to the witching hour, when young spotty P-platers with all-too-powerful Utes prove their manliness by screaming away from street corners in a cloud of burning tire smoke and a roar of their V8 cylinder 6.0 litre petrol engines.
The problem is that Australia is blessed with the kind of perfect weather that drives most people and most things outside for most of the day and the rest of the night. The wildlife thrives, the tradies work from dawn ‘til dusk, the kids party all evening, and the rest of us lie wide awake in our beds crying out for some peace.
The serene green fields of England, with well-mannered sparrows and robins chirruping from under the eaves of the houses, church bells gently pealing in the distance, and the odd guttural moo from a fully-fed cow feeding close by are but a distant, diminishing memory. Sleepy villages and idyllic countryside are no more, replaced by noisy, badly behaved antipodean creatures of all sizes, great and small.
Image Credit: avilasal
I loved the birds in Australia, I really did. So beautiful, so exotic! It wasn’t until I landed back home that I realized what the Aussie birds lacked: pretty voices. Their birdsong repertoire was much more Metal than Mozart. When the birds wake me up in Canada, they do so gently; in Australia, they jerked me out of sleep so abruptly, my heart would pound long after I’d left my bed. Even so, I do miss those gorgeous, colourful birds!
Don’t get me wrong, they are absolutely beautiful birds. Just last night, we had five brightly coloured lorikeets feeding not two yards from where we were sat (we call them our ‘friendlies’). They look like small parrots and really are lovely to look at.
But they’re voices sure ain’t pretty. The squawk that the cockatoo lets out as it flies low overhead with its head down watching the ground is enough the wake the dead. The Indian Minor birds attack any newcomers to their patch with a ferosity that would make a small chaffinch fall over.
Yet I would indeed miss them if we ever moved on…
No doubt. I’m no bird-watcher, yet there is an elegance in birds. (Well, maybe not vultures) When we lived in North Carolina we had some of the tallest trees in the neighborhood in our backyard. A family of hawks loved hanging out on the tallest two trees, darting in and out, looking for prey. Every now and then you’d see one with a snake (likely a poisonous cottonmouth) or bunny in its beak, soaring across the sky. We had to keep a close eye on our smaller cat (aka ‘potential lunch’), but I miss the swooping beauty of such gorgeous birds…
Wow. Some bird. Reminds me of Canada and the American Bald Eagles we’d see… amazing creatures.
Had me chuckling. I so empathise. In WA we have parrots that squawk and crows that moan like noisy babies too. Having said that, I do love them, and on return visits to the UK sometimes find the well mannered birds a little, well, reserved.
Welcome Johanna, and thanks. Vive la difference!
Thanks Johanna. Forgot about the crows. Those buggers won’t show up as well. And great big things. Large enough to steal a small child or goat away.
I think the UK birds have been taught to behave through thousands of years of training by mankind there. We just need to work a little harder on the Aussie birds to bring them up to speed.
Now what to do about the P-platers…
Interesting fact/ theory – songbirds worldwide originated in Aus and NZ*.
Query: So why then have our birds evolved into bogans?? Is it a consequence of competition? And can the rest of the world avoid this fate?
*Refs:
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1860533.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/songbirds-arose-in-australian-region/3125744
It never dawned on me that songbirds originated anywhere, Justin; I thought birds worldwide all did their own version of ‘singing’. Thanks for sharing these links
Thanks Justin. For the non-Australia dwellers out there, a ‘bogan’ is a term used primarily in Australia to describe a particular section of the working class demographic i.e. a particular vocabulary, choice of clothing, type of house, etc., etc. (you get my drift!)…
In the birdworld, it has got to mean a badly behaved, ill-mannered flying thing that won’t keep quiet until my alarm has gone off.
So why did lovely songbirds turn into maddening winged creatures? I haven’t the foggiest!
I enjoyed your blog tremendously. My brother lives in a quiet (?) suburb of Brisbane. We have only visited him once (but would love to go again) as it is very far from us on our Caribbean island… But I recall reeling in shock the first morning when we were woken in our little hotel in Darlinghurst, Sydney by the most unearthly screeching. It was a flock of cockatoos that I have only ever seen one at a time, in a cage. Astonishing! Jamaica (especially Kingston, where I live) is very noisy too – mostly man-made, thumping bass-lines aplenty, and any excuse for a party. Worst of all, though, are the rampaging street dogs. Quiet tonight – so far, so good… I enjoyed your blog and hope you will take a look at mine sometime!
Hi Emma – I hope you’re talking about my blog, not Linda’s, which is of course so superior in quality
(only kidding of course). Will gladly have a look at your blog.
I didn’t mention the neighbourhood dogs in my post, which I should have done. Contrary to the northern hemisphere where, for the most part, dogs are kept indoors at least during some part of the day and night, here they are kept outdoors 24/7. Line up 8-10 houses back to back with dogs roaming free in the garden all day long and you’ve got a veritable orchestra of noise pollution.
At least my pooch is quiet for the most part… kind of… when he wants to be.
Russell, do you know this one:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry merry king of the bush is he-e
Laugh kookaburra laugh
Kookaburra gay your life must be!
Can’t possibly call yourself an honorary Australian if you don’t!
Kym, we learned this in our little elementary school in the good ol’ USA! We didn’t really know what a kookaburra was, so assumed it was a koala bear.
I think I’m about to be kicked out of the country. I’d never heard that one before
I’ve heard the one about Jake the peg. Does that count?
As much as I like nature and to hear birds singing I am sure that it would drive me crazy if I had to wake up every day at 4:30 am from all the noise they were making!
In the spring and as days start to get longer here in the north, I usually wake up very early too, because of the birds starting their morning cantatas… but usually once I get used to the noise, I go back to waking up at my usual time.
Hang in there!!
And in the daytime too… It’s 1pm lunchtime right now and I can hear magpies calling, Indian miner (minor?) birds squawking, a few rosellas buzzing about, and the call of some other wild creature… no, take that back, that was just my wife calling out to me
It’s great here really, just a little too musical early in the AM. But I would miss it.
I see your Kookaburras and raise you a gaggle of ravens who begin their squawking over our persimmon tree at approximately 4 am. When I moved here, they drove me batty. Gah. But, these days with a poorly sleeping toddler, I usually so exhausted that I can fall asleep mid-sentence and sleep through just about everything. So maybe that’s your solution!
As for the uninsulated houses, I feel you. And I’ve got nothing. Sorry.
Thanks, Erica. I’ll pass on your tips to my wife and tell her to get to it. I’ll keep you posted on how many toddlers we manage to fill the house with to counteract the noise
I can totally relate. When I have guests come stay with me in Shanghai they are constantly asking about the banging construction outside. The funny part is – I no longer notice! I can only wish that you too will get to the point of acceptance (or there’s a chance that you’ll go slightly crazy).
I’ve also found a good pair of earplugs. Whatever works.
Welcome Greta, nice to have you here. It must be fascinating living in China, loved the explanation of the name of your site (Zhong Guo Jumble).
Thanks, Greta. I’m hanging on in here, clinging to my sanity.
Good news on the noise front at home though. A row of cumbersome fir trees have just been removed from outside the house (where we park the car), which means the accompanying bats and possums will have to live and poop somewhere else