frauke at large

What is it with this country and the constant noise!? It starts just after dawn, when the building site next to the campus resumes work – at 5.45am!

Drilling, welding, shouting work force and general building site shenanigans greet the day. This is followed, at around 6.25am, by some 20 minutes of repeated military music blasting out of the loudspeakers of the school next to it – presumably to wake the poor children. With a short 10 minute interval this is then followed by some freakish, fantasy movie piano music that is occasionally overpowered by taxi horns beeping and lorry horns signaling that they are about to run someone over in the street if they don’t get out of the way – and quick! Roughly 2 minutes after that – it is now around 7am – the national anthem is blasted across the school’s campus, followed by some guy with a microphone shouting stuff in Chinese. Whistles are blown and the school kids are mindlessly and repeatedly shouting ‘slogans’ whilst marching up and down the sports field in lines of two – some holding flags. Whilst this is all going on, sprinkled around the area, e-bike alarms, with their never-ending array of different burglar alarm sirens, go off, as people unlock (or, in this case, forget to unlock) their e-bikes to go to work. A short sprinkling of parts of ‘The Nutcracker’ music later and by now it’s also almost time for the nannies on this campus to bring the children outside to play. And in between screaming and shouting nannies, one is almost unable to hear the excited shrieks of playing children.

This whole spectrum of noise is repeated, using random combinations, throughout the day, at different decibel levels and finally comes to a rest at about 10.30pm, when peace and quiet is sporadically interrupted, throughout the night, by firecrackers and fireworks mimicking the backdrop to a war zone. Oh, and did I mention the use of megaphones as advertising tools outside shops that add to the plethora of noise in the streets?

I’m exaggerating slightly, of course (only with reference to the constant fireworks during the night though), however one has to wonder: is this constant noise an attempt by this country to signal to its ‘consumers’ that is in a growth phase? Is it driven by the need to share everything with everyone? Or has it always been like that? Whichever one it is … quel pain!

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