Actually just sounds in general.
As you would expect in any town there are the sounds of traffic shuffling around, although remarkably few horns despite the relative density and assortment of vehicles dashing around each other. It is truly a delight to watch the cars, buses, trucks motorcycles/mopeds and bicycles swirl around each other. I am told there are traffic laws but the police are so laid back, at least in town, that unless you are a real idiot you are left alone. It is apparently different on the roads outside of towns where a different set of police are in charge (two sets actually if I recall correctly).
Traffic flows really well, there are few if any stop signs, you are expected to use your common sense (shock horror) and since that is the expectation that is what happens. The 2-wheel-motivated people dart in and around quite impressively and for the most part seem to get away with this. In the three weeks we have been in Mexico we have seen one accident and that was in Mexico City when a car was going around a stopped bus – it was a very low speed bump, no injuries, mild histrionics. I am sure there are accidents of a more serious nature: there are after all memorials littered along the roadsides.
Most mornings there is a truck cruising each neighborhood delivering gas bottles. Said truck pays a catchy jingle to get your attention, it reminds me of the ice-cream trucks in England. The jingle is that sort of annoyingly catchy, stick in your head for hours sort. There is no centralized gas-distribution network so each house has a bottle hook up for a mongo bottle about 2.5 times the size of one you might see attached to the back of a forklift. It is really impressive to watch the delivery guys carry these things – they must weigh easily 100lbs.
It is Sunday morning so the tamale truck just passed by. I had a hard time making out what was being said through the loudspeaker strapped to the roof of the mini van but having watched from the roof for a while I realized that tamales and something else were being sold. Have to scurry down in time next weekend and try some tamales for breakfast.
There are chickens and roosters in quite a few of the houses hear-abouts and one house up the alley that seems to have a goose or two. It is great to hear the roosters, reminds me of when we moved to our house in Oakland (before Oakland banned roosters – you can still have chickens though). The roosters crow off and on all day long sometimes seemingly getting set off by the dogs and sometimes setting the dogs off.
A lot of people have small to medium dogs, frequently roaming around on the roof terrace of the house to which they belong. Much excitement on the part of the dogs when school lets out and the street swells with people. There are also loose dogs which are running around,scavenging: the other day we saw a golden retrievery looking dog with the skull of a cow that had been used to make broth – I wish I had the camera with me at the time as it was quite a sight. The dog was sooooo happy. The loose and roaming dogs are very aware of their surroundings and take care not to get run over although I imagine it does happen from time to time. They want nothing to do with people, to Darcie’s chagrin, and rarely make any noise. They do set the roof-bound dogs off though.
The church bells are very entertaining. I am used to bells ringing the hour, you know, one bell – 1 o’clock, 3 bells – 3 o’clock and so on. Then there may or may not be some sort of bell tolling at the quarter hour. Here they do ring the bells but not to tell the actual hour seemingly. There will be a ringing as you might expect, solemn, well paced and you think aha it is, now wait, let me see, count the tolls, one, two, three… holy cow it can’t possibly be fourteen o’clock. I haven’t figured it out but what seems to happen is there is a solemn tolling for about 4 bells, then the bell rings madly for a bit and then there is a bit more solemn tolling. This announces the hour. In between the bells toll madly at the quarter. There are quite a few churches within a few mile radius of the house. It is lovely to hear real bells unlike the canned, loudspeaker variety that is usually used in California.
Children get out of school around 1pm and the street life picks up from there. A couple of days ago a group of 8 or so boys had a happy rock fight with each other out in the street. They were hurling golf ball-sized rocks at each other, poorly aimed, but the cars and trucks were occasional, unintended but easy targets for the poorly lobbed rocks. The dogs were going crazy. Eventually the police showed up and the boys scattered.
The lady who lives in the house next door across the alley is a bird lover and has a collection of budgies of some sort under her roof level canopy. They chatter happily all day, surrounded by the pretty, rooftop garden. There are also small doves, some sort of sparrow, the ubiquitous pigeons (surprisingly few of these), every now and again a brilliant red sparrow-sized bird with a black mask and yesterday I saw two what must have been birds of prey swirling briefly overhead. They had pretty large, rectangular wings with long golden wingtip feathers and a tail that seemed to be long and narrow with a feathery bit at the end. As I was indisposed at the time staring absentmindedly out the skylight that is the best I can do. There are also hummingbirds zipping about, chasing each other as usual and performing mid-air acrobatics, one just came in through our wide open door, checked us out and backed off and away.
In the afternoon there is an ice cream truck that drives around. It is a pick-up truck with a pitched roof mounted over the bed. The bed contains a random number of barrels wherein tubs of ice cream are packed surrounded by ice. Of course there is a catchy jingle to alert you that ice cream is in the offing. The truck that visits our ‘hood plays a piano tune reminiscent of a 1920’s scat/flapper tune. Makes us want to get your ‘20’s on and dance around the roof. The ice cream is not the sort of dreadful factory-made bars, Mr. Softee cones and ices you get in the US and UK normally. It’s hand-scooped into a cup or a cone and quite yummy and only 3 pesos a scoop (about 23 cents).
Every evening starting in the late afternoon, there are men wandering around the neighborhood crying out some phrase in a rising/falling tone – very enchanting but to us unintelligible. We finally saw one of these fellows a few days ago on one of our wanderings. He had a pole across his shoulders with a 5 gallon bucket hanging at each end. We couldn’t make out what he was selling or collecting. More research needed. Talked with Yaya our landlady and she said the men are crying “elotes” which is corn.
Again in the evening there is a chap in our neighborhood pushing a metal cart around that has a fire chamber at the bottom and a steam whistle poking up about three feet. He strolls around periodically tooting the whistle. It makes this terrific, initially loud and high dying to soft and low sound. Yaya says they are selling sweet potatoes and sometimes bananas.
Once the sun has set and dusk is dwindling the fireworks come out. Usually they are just little bottle rockets and firecrackers but occasionally there are bigger rockets that woosh up and explode in a deafening bang that makes one jump if you don’t expect it . Last night the boys at the corner had gotten a hold of some M80’s (about a quarter stick of dynamite) and were merrily setting them off under an old high-top sneaker to much amusement. Every now and again they would get this just right and the sneaker would leap up 30ft or so into the air – hilarious. Apparently there used to be a lot more of this kind of thing but the City has clamped down on it so you get 10 minutes or so of such joie-de-vivre and then the police cruise past. It is a shame but I suppose endless explosions all evening, late into the evening would get a bit tedious.
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