Noise - Revisited

We are growing used to life in the city and the noise bothers us less every day. I came to the realization yesterday that we live about 2 blocks from the equivalent of Times Square and noise is part of the allure. City life has been growing on us.

Also, I figured out that our bedroom window has a wooden screen which lowers outside over the window and helps reduce the sounds of cars during the night. When I was looking out of the window yesterday I noticed that the majority of windows across the street had wooden screens pulled down at 7am. I quickly found the retracted screen on our window along with the controls which were hidden in a small cabinet adjacent to the window.

This is our second time renting an apartment in a foreign county in the past 12 months. The property manager never explains all of the details and the renter is left to discover these small items individually.

A few examples are required. In Spain they did not show us how to use the dead bolt which was a major problem for our neighbors. In Argentina we were told that the "trash goes outside". It took a few nights to understand this -- trash is placed on the sidewalk, poor people come around between 9-11pm and collect bottles from the trash to sell to the recycling plant, and the trash truck picks up random piles of trash bags all night long. There are no trash bins, just random piles of bags (less the bottles) lying everywhere that disappear by the morning.