It has been fairly quiet here now that the ten day holiday is over, if you don't count the man playing the tuba and the man playing the drums and the man playing some kind of game where they screamed at the top of their lungs every few minutes and the crying puppies and the barking dogs and the radio music. And this was all just what I heard from my back door.
I would consider moving to someplace quiet but that would either mean out to the country or out of the Country. How much you pay in rent or to buy makes no difference. I have friends living in a five hundred thousand dollar mansion who are being driven out by all the noise in their neighborhood. That is close to where I first lived, near the soccer field. They now have huge new speakers that blow the sounds throughout the neighborhood. I can hear them from here, many blocks away. Late Sunday night when the announcers are drunk and yelling into the microphones and the music is blasting, my friends cannot sleep. Their neighbors also let a pack of big dogs that they own out to roam around in the streets and they get into fights. So, you see, you never know when you rent or buy here, what the neighbors are like.
You could play it safe and live in a gated expat community. I spent a few weeks in El Parque. During the high season there are lots of parties and it is noisy. But why move to Mexico if you are going to live in an expat community? They are not cheap and when you are in them you can't tell that you are in Mexico. So why bother to move down here?
The trick is to learn how to put up with the noise. How to hear it without hearing it, if you know what I mean. That is what the Mexicans do. Noise doesn't seem to bother them. It gives people more freedom. You never have to think about how your noise affects people around you.
One day my friend was exhausted from not sleeping at night because her neighbor was playing loud music every night, all night long. So she went to this woman's house and as politely as she could explained that she needed to sleep and would she please turn her radio down late at night.
The woman's angry response was,"I am a Mexican. I can do anything I want."
I believe that Mexicans have a lot more freedom than people have in the United States but at what price? Not much if you can learn not to hear noise. My friend Nicks wears hearing aids. He takes them out at night and he sleeps peacefully. But I wouldn't want to have to lose my hearing just so I can sleep at night. The next option is to learn to live with it. Like I wrote already, hear it but not hear it.
I am enjoying not hearing all those fireworks day and night but this respite is temporary. Christmas holidays will be here soon and more fireworks. You cannot change Mexico. You can only change yourself and sometimes even that is impossible. So my friends living in the big house near the soccer fields are getting ready to put their house on the market and move back to Portland. For now, I am staying here and working on my ability of not hearing or reacting to noise. Crying children, crying babies and crying dogs and crying puppies are the hardest sounds for me to ignore. That must be in the advanced lesson. I am still a beginner.
