After the scooters-flood and the tube-houses, I noticed the noise! A terrible noise! A continuous, loud, disturbing noise! The annoying noise of horns!
All drivers love to horn; ALL THE TIME!
When they overcome a car - they horn, when they overcome a scooter - they horn; when they don’t want to overcome anyone at all- they horn; when they are about to cross an intersection - they horn 200 meters before to announce their triumphal arrival !
Everybody seems to be able to drive only if they use the stupid horn !
It must be attached to the engine and probably as soon as it is released, you get no more gas, or something...
And this happens starting with six in the morning till about eleven in the evening.
And above all this horning, there are other sounds forming a kind of a street-orchestra with no harmonics.
The street-sellers, the ones selling popcorn for example, they have their own sound – more exactly their own way of making noise: a cute&loud song like “Lambada”, or carols, or “Oh, Su-sa-na, oh, don't you cry for me”... At a point, doesn't even matter if you are a Susana or not, all you feel like doing is crying OUT LOUD!
The ones who want to drive you around on their taxi-bikes, they also have a recognizable, specific loud sound/noise of their own. And a bell ringing is the sound/noise that let people know the garbage will be lifted.
But as an ultimate sound-stress torturing formula is this: on the pillars at the corners of the streets there are megaphones that announce the news; it is a loud-robot-female voice that talks in the same rhythm for 15 minutes… Every morning, every afternoon, every evening!
What can I say?! Since we are here, every single evening we have a headache!
After 2 months, the time we are supposed to stay here, it'll be very easy for anyone to make our deepest wish come true: silence… just a plain-big-sacred silence!
The thing is that the “good rooms” in the hotels are always facing the street and no matter how courageous and ready to experience it all you might think you are, I'm telling you, you do not want to experience this bad ones...
I looked one whole day for another hotel, on a little hidden street maybe, more silent, but they are all the same.
They are all the same as the noise is concerned, but I noticed that sometimes the bathroom is different: there is no bathtub or shower like we're use to have in a bathroom; there is just a long wire that comes out from the sink faucet serving as the shower itself.
So you can take the shower seated on the toilet if you want.
(Who am I kidding?! I had a shower like that for a few years when I was a student and living in the campus. And it was good, and fun! And I was always clean!)
The receptionist always assures you that there is hot water. Which makes me think that this is not so usual, otherwise it wouldn’t be mentioned, right? One more thing to make sure of when getting in a Vietnamese hotel then! Good to know!
All this noise-mess sounds to me just like a radio that never gets to catch hold of a channel. A perpetual unpleasant gnashing and if you know the sound, imagine how it must be to hear it all day...
I counted once in a morning, as I woke up at six, the longest moment of silence between horns: the record was 10 seconds.
We will move from this hotel! That's a must!
The apartment that we somehow managed to rent it is fortunately on a side street and the silence between horns could give you sometimes a holiday of about 20 seconds… which we know now, it is goooood !
And the bedroom is great: weekends we can sleep late if we close all the windows and doors!
If in China I was going blind in amazement, here I am definitely going deaf!
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