Would You Just Shut Up!?

NOISE: any loud, discordant or disagreeable sound

Webster's Dictionary

What a pain in the ear!

If there's something that gets to me it's noise. Unnecessary noise I mean, as opposed to everyday noises that one cannot avoid such as washing machines, vacuums, aircraft, sirens, etc.

Not all that is noise is loud, not all that is loud is noise. Noise is any sound that bothers us -or me in this case.

That said, I ended up living in Spain -the second noisiest country in the world according to www.ruidos. org, a Spanish organisation against noise.

It's true, there's so much noise here and all this noise hurts my sensitive ears and stresses me out.

There's the girls downstairs; I can hear everything they say and their stupid, moron-like laugh all day and night long. There's the couple opposite whose kid shouts and screams non-stop; the woman upstairs who wears high-heels in the house - I can hear the toc, toc, toc of her shoes all over the place at 6am. And there's everybody else in this bloody building who cannot close a door without slamming it!

On top of that there's the bin men and the street washers at half past one in the morning -you wouldn't believe how much noise they make!
There's also the shop downstairs dragging god-knows-what across the pavement at 7am as they clean their shop and wake all their neighbours up.

There's the boy racers with their stupid noisy cars and loud music, the drunks who stagger home at about 5am shouting and singing in the streets.
And it all seems to happen right under my bedroom window.

Also, I must not forget to mention the Spanish, or rather Latino, way of communicating: sounding their horns. They cannot leave the damn things alone, and use the horns for everything and for an absurd length of time. It drives me absolutely mad.

It doesn't help, of course, that the buildings have paper thin walls and that in this country there isn't a law which stops people from opening shops, bars, cafes, discos, etc in residential areas.
In fact, there aren't any residential areas at all, it's just a mess of jumbled up, ugly buildings.

There was an article in a local paper called QUE! (WHAT!) yesterday that reads 'One in three Spaniards gets stressed out by their neighbours' noise." The noise that disturbs 42% of them is their neighbours' shouting -see graphs above and right.

Many have had to sell their flats or move somewhere else because they could no longer put up with the noise; I find this absurd. Click here to read the article in Spanish

They get annoyed with it but (surprise surprise!) they do nothing about it. Is it a Spanish trait to simply put up with things and pretend they do not exist instead of complaining and trying to sort things out?

I don't want to contribute to the noise by shouting CALLATE CONO! out of my window, or by putting loud music on to shut out other noises. I don't want to move house to find a decent, quiet place with civilised neighbours to live in - I like my flat.

So, what should I do?
I have tried talking to them courteously but it hasn't worked. They become scornful, sometimes even aggressive.

Even now as I write this just before I go to work, I can hear the girls downstairs making so much din it makes me sick, and I know that at work it will be impossible to teach at about 5.30pm because one of the neighbours always puts his stupid heavy metal music on so loud that I cannot concentrate, and my students can hardly hear what I say.

Oh, so much stress.