This is the lovely sight behind our apartment building. Because I'm done with work at either 12 or 3 pm I like to lounge by the pool, in fact, the main/only reason why I desperately wanted to live in this particular apartment was because there is a pool here. For weeks I daydreamed about how nice it'd be to lay out after a long and early morning of teaching, soaking up the last of the summer rays, getting drunk off the heat and slipping in and out of sleep.
Well, the downside of living in this particular neighborhood is that new luxury apartments are being built up everywhere you look, raising prices and forcing out the people who traditionally lived here, you know, gentrification at its finest. Where social strife leads noisiness follows. Noisiness, clamour and potential fatalities to be exact. To combat the cacophony of drills, jackhammers, regular hammers and general street noise I have my ipod set to a pretty high volume to begin with, but even that isn't even enough sometimes. For instance today, when I heard a massive crack and my eyelids snapped open just in the nick of time to see a huge slab of concrete fall off the side of the building, hit the external rope elevator and crumble into a bunch of smaller but still deadly slabs before they hit the ground in a great cloud of dust. I sat up and went "Oh my God!" certain that somebody had just been severly injured if not killed, but no. The elevator stopped for about a nanosecond, the drilling and hammering stopped for about two seconds and then everything resumed as normal. These are amazingly resilient people.
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