Another post I had written and forgot about. This happened while we were still living in the guest house.
Listening to: Suga Suga – Baby Bash
Mood: Matches the beautiful Bangalore sunshine outside
The family and I, in our little holding pattern we have
going on here (more on this later), are living in a guest house, as I’m sure
I’ve mentioned before. As far as India goes, we live in a very residential,
quiet neighborhood. I need to qualify
this a little bit. There is absolutely no quiet place in civilization in India.
Perhaps if you want to go sit out in a field somewhere in bumbledum, you may
find some silence until people come along, which won’t take long. India is just
not the place to go for solitude. Try Nepal perhaps. Or Tibet. Anyhow. By
quiet, I mean that we don’t live right off a major road, so we don’t get the
massive amounts of noise that cars with horns bring. We do, however, have some
cars, shouting fruit vendors, construction noise (pretty much omnipresent in
any half developed neighborhood), the paper walla (most of the time this refers to selling
something, like a tea walla sells tea, but this refers to buying – they get
money for buying bulk used newspaper from the neighborhood and then selling it
for slightly higher cost) shouting for paper, the ever present people outside
talking, and oh my holy noise pollution Batman with the dogs and the school
across the street. It’s enough to make a
person insane.
India is a hotbed of fornicating dogs. There are stray dogs everywhere. Most of the time during the day, they pick a nice
sunshiny spot to nap in or a nice garbage pile to pick through and don’t bother
anyone unless you bump into them or harass them. At night, they revert to crazy
wolf like pack mentality and go about their nights in a crazy loud battle for
supremacy of the neighborhood and pack. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve
woken up in the night wishing with all my might that I had a rifle, BB gun or
even a stick to throw at some yapping, snarling, whining dog outside. I LOVE
dogs, but any dog that is making this amount of noise at 3 am needs to learn
some survival skills that include not barking at my window. Or near it,
whatever.
We also happen to live right across the street from a small,
local school. I will never, ever make the mistake of staying across from a
school in India again. The school is a
maze of hallways with classrooms off of them. They have a marching band (which
includes a LOT of drums) that has been practicing every day starting at 8 am
all day for a exhibition that they will have. As previously mentioned, I’m
barely coping with my new found morning person-ness. Having to listen to drums
that start at 8 am before I’ve even had a cup of coffee and last all day is
killing my soul very slowly. They also have some routine that depends on some
bass heavy dance music. And Yeh Hai Bombay Mere Jaan (an old Hindi song). Now I like that song. Quite a bit actually.
What I don’t like is hearing a crappy keyboard version played over 8 hours at a
volume that is so loud it’s distorted. Seriously. Won’t someone please think of
the children? I cannot imagine being at ground zero across the street and not
ending up with hearing loss.
After all the griping about noise in the neighborhood, we
come to a positive point. I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of the stereotype
about India that there are cows wandering around at will. We didn’t see too much of this in Hyderabad. Plenty
of buffalos, but very few free ranging cows. Bangalore, however, is absolutely
filled with random stray cows. Our neighborhood in particular has at least 10
that roam around. They’re ugly, dirty beasts that love to dig through trash
piles, but I still get a smile on my face about how they are able to wander
around unbothered anywhere they wish. I’ve seen them wander into people’s yards
and right up to fruit carts. Aside from a gentle shooing so they don’t steal
fruit, no one even bats an eye. It’s fantastic. With all of the progressive
changes that have happened for India, it’s still a very much wild, untamed
place.
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