Cacophony

The noises here are different from the noises in our neighborhood in Corvallis. Here, when we go to sleep at night, we hear a babble of voices from across the street in "the village." By the way, did we mention we found out it really is a village, with a chief and everything? Anyway, besides voices we often hear music, sometimes live, sometimes from a radio, drumming, and someone nearby has a t.v. The noise is generally louder on weekends.

In the mornings we hear (usually in this order) roosters, which start crowing well before dawn we've found out, songbirds, chickens, goats, cows, ibis which caw louder than crows, cars, and people. Occasionally our downstairs neighbor is outside way too early talking on his cell phone. My guess is he's conducting business with someone in a different country and that's why he's up so early, but he's speaking something besides English, so I can't eavesdrop to know for sure. The last 18 hours we've had a cow across the street bellowing non-stop, and I'm not exaggerating . Is it dying? Sick? Giving birth? I can't tell, but it can't be a happy cow. I hope its problem gets solved soon.

I'm glad to say, though, that the noise rarely keeps us awake. Maybe there's enough of it that it blends together. It's an interesting combination of farm noises and city noises, though without the background hum of constant traffic that you'd get in a Western city. The picture at the top of the page is a typical house in our neighborhood.

On another subject, the latest on our ATM problem is that we tried two more ATMs on Sat., one of which gave us money. So we're set for now, and curious to see what happens next time we try one.