I’m always struck
By the variety of sounds
That permeate the days and nights here.
It starts in the early morning, before eight,
With the recorded gas truck song,
The truck goes so fast down the street
You have to run as fast as you can through the house
Then open the door and wolf whistle to get their attention.
Then the garbage men come, clanging metal
Then the water guys, banging on doors, yelling
‘Agua Santorini! Agua Santorini!’
Then the milk truck at 11 am sharp
Blaring it’s horn as it goes down the street,
Not just a little toot either.
Don’t forget
All the loudspeakers on cars
Starting with tamale and atole sellers,
The metal collectors whose recording
Is so bad you’d never under stand it.
Then there are political announcements,
Fruit and vegetable sellers in trucks with music,
Women on motorcycles selling yogult
A man who sells milk off a donkey
The man who yodels ‘elooooote, cacajuate’
The party music on the weekends,
Locos, mariachis, trios singing.
Oh yes, the fireworks and rockets
Church bells, and of course, the barking dogs.
It’s alive here and you know it.
We’ll see what we can collect
To add to the video below of every day sounds
Starting with our daily ice cream truck
Followed by the luscious sound
Of the surprise downpour that we had yesterday,
The dogs barking tonight, rockets, cats meowing
And the church bells this morning.
I’ll update the video as my collection grows.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkTaG-rIkqQ]
Besides all this every day noise
There is a lot of public works activity
Around our streets.
My last visit to the states,
I was struck by how completed,
How finished everything is.
Nothing left to do but protect it.
I love living in a neighborhood
That is a little rough around the edges
With people doing things poco a poco
As they say here – not on borrowed money
But on what they earn and save up
To work on it slowly, when they can.
In the last few weeks
We have two brand new streets.
One behind us and one below.
The sidewalks and cobblestones
Are done on one, and the other
To follow in the coming weeks.
Calle Soledad
Calle San Martin – sidewalks going in this week, then the cobblestones. The kids are having a good old time crawling in all the holes and digging in the dirt piles.
Here’s another thing I love looking at
Laundry hanging on lines everywhere
Which includes hanging it on cactus plants
In the campo.
Sometimes it looks like papel picado flying in the wind.
In the foreground, a type of red hot poker tree that blooms this time of year.
Our nutcracker squirrel who now lives on the terrazza. In the background, Eutimio (of the barking dog story) has just about completed his new house and painted it so typically Mexican with a bright yellow dome with bright blue trim. It looks great against all the unfinished brick walls here.
Wow, Suzanne, it is surprisingly wonderful to hear the ice cream man, though I miss the recorded sounds of the gas tank trucks. I love it. Thanks for showing us what the rain is like there. Wild to see it coming into the middle of your house. That must be so cool. I’m keepin up with sma because of you. Thanks so much. Miss ya…
Great idea about recording the sounds. Here in Irapuato we have a newspaper called “El Sol” (The Sun). The vendors walk down the streets crying “Sooooooooollllll”. I like to listen to the vendors in the market also…Jítomates, tres por diez, tres por diez, pásale”.