noise noise noise

i've learned a valuable lesson about apartments- when looking to rent one, especially in shanghai, check very carefully if there is any construction going on. failure to do this could result in a lot of sleepless nights.

my apartment is located near people's square, a very nice green view. when i first checked out my apartment and looked out the window at the view i unfortunately didn't look down- if i had i would have seen the following...



that's a tunnel going in, right under my apartment complex. when i first moved in things weren't so bad as the construction would take place during the day when i'm working. now, however, they have received a apecial permit to work 24 hours and boy, do they use it. then there's the apartment renovation below me which was another story that has fortunately concluded.

if there's a constant noise, like the drone of car horns typically heard here, it's not so bad. unfortunately there are periods of quiet, usually just long enough to drift into light sleep, punctuated by a variety of sharp noises like cutting pieces of metal (sample video here) with saws and dropping large objects onto hard surfaces from great heights.

at night the noises usually are the backhoes moving objects and accidently striking things, the sound of the pump moving the cement into the tunnel, or some sort of strange pneumatic drilling noise (sample video here).

fortunately, one of our customers took pity on me and donated a set of foam airline ear plugs. those things work great- much better than the wadded up balls of tissue paper i had been using before. between those and the aircon unit most of the noise gets filtered out.

i thought about launching some fireworks down into the construction site but as i could get in a little bit of trouble for that i decided perhaps just grinning and bearing it is the best course of action. as bad as it is, it's definitely no worse than living on the third floor of a frat house during college.