Noise

Round Midnight

Our house has many things going for it, a stellar view of a canal teaming with bird-life, full sun all morning and afternoon and a pretty handy location - just 8 minutes by bike into the centre of Amsterdam. On the downside it's noisy as folk, if you know what I mean. Most nights a stream of drunken cyclists career past laughing and shouting dooiey (bye-ee) to each other in "day-time outside" voices oblivious to Amsterdam sleeping around them. B.C.(Before Cal) I kind of used to like hearing girls giggling on their way home. I'd smile, thinking of Amy and I when we were students riding home at 4am after a night of biertjes, then roll over and go right back to sleep. Now I shake sleepy fists at them.

We are the meat in a sandwich of noise. Above us we have our friends with their 3 and 5 year olds who we affectionately refer to as the "baby elephants" for the stampede of noise that ensues from 6 am till 8pm everyday, and beneath us we have a 20 year old bong-smoking, guitar-playing, party-throwing student whom we less affectionately refer to as the "feest cabouter" or, party gnome. If it's not one, it's the other. Just as the pitter-patter of not-so-tiny feet subsides, the buzzer starts going and Party Gnome's friends start turning up to partake of the bong and x-box, or whatever it is boys sit around shouting at these days. With every toddler stomp and frat-boy shout I wince, waiting for the saddest sound in the world - a baby who doesn't know why it's suddenly awake. 

As I lay in bed at 2 am last night listening to the stupid guffaws that only drunken stoned dudes can make, I wondered if knocking on Party Gnome's door in my vomit-stained dressing gown and explaining just how very little sleep I get would make a difference. I thought about taking Cal with me to illustrate the point, but know Cal would just smile sweetly at him. One dude to another. I tried to tell myself that living in cities is about living amongst people. All types of people. Young ones, old ones, noisy ones, quiet ones. I practiced my celebrity-birth-breathing yoga techniques (I paid for the CDs and after an emergency c-section still feel the need to get my money's worth somehow) and was almost asleep, but then I thought of David asleep in a hotel room somewhere, all starchy white sheets and black-out curtains and I got really cross. So cross that when the smoke detector in the hallway randomly went off at 3.15am I was still awake, already mad as can be about being awake. Lights went on, chairs were dragged across the floor, smoke detectors were ripped out of the ceiling because I couldn't figure out the release mechanism, and there was cussing. Cal slept through it all. Of course.

It's almost enough to drive you to the suburbs. Almost.