Throughout the last few years of living in various different apartment buildings, student housing accommodation and flat shares, I have collected quite a few stories about all the different neighbours I have had! When you share buildings with lots of other people, you do come across some very, how shall I put it, individual characters with some unique habits. In general, I love living in an apartment; I feel safe, I feel a sense of community, I feel like I am someone's neighbour and I enjoy being part of that. However, living altogether in the same building does mean that you are forced to be much closer to your neighbours than you would be if you each lived in your own house. You really get to know people personally, you get a window (sometimes literally) into their intimate lives and I have to say that sometimes this can drive you mad! In another way, though, it can be very eye-opening; these are people that you would never have met otherwise, they wouldn't necessarily be your friends or people that you would normally socialise with and so it can be really amazing to get to know these other kinds of lives. I wanted to share some of my neighbour stories here in a blog post to give an example of just how interesting the world of neighbours can be and I would absolutely love to hear some of your stories in return!
The first story that comes to mind was an experience that I had when I lived in a student accommodation building in Salzburg. The building, which was absolutely huge with probably around 200 people living there, was full of students of all kinds and of all ages, from young music students to older history students. In the basenment of the building was the laundry room, where the entire building shared two washing machines and a dryer, each costing about 2 Euros per use. To save a little bit of money, I never used the dryer - instead, like a lot of other people in the building, I hung up all of my wet clothes on the washing lines, provided in the same room, and went back to collect them a day later when they had dried. Now, I lived in this building for three years and I never had an issue except for ONE TIME, when I went back to collect my dry clothes from the washing line, only to find that someone had stolen all of my pyjamas!!! They had left all of my clothes, had only taken my, rather old, red pyjamas covered with dogs! To this day I am still confused by this - why did they want my old pyjamas so much?!
My next bewildering neighbour experience was when I moved into my own flat in a small building in Germany. I quickly found out that I had a rather noisy upstairs neighbour, but not in the ways you might think. I don't know what it was, but I heard a continuous sound of stomping feet, at all times of the day and night, going around in circles on my ceiling. I came up with so many theories as to what it could be; first I thought it was a noisy washing machine that moved when it was on, then I thought he must have lots of guests over all the time and that it was several different people walking around. Then I noticed one day when I bumped into him that he wore these HUGE Dr. Martin style biker boots. I also never saw anyone else going in or coming out of his flat, so I knew then it must be just him stomping around - and when I mean stomping, I mean heavy, loud bangs all over my ceiling that sometimes even shook my bed! And this would continue long into the night. My Dad came to visit me and came up with, what I think, is probably the closest solution - this this neighbour must have had an mental health issue, such as OCD, which forced him to continually walk around his flat, back and fourth, back and fourth. However, the truth of matter remains a mystery.
The following story only occured quite recently and I have found it incredibly interesting! I have lived in the flat that I am currently in, with my boyfriend, for the past year and we both started to notice a strange sounding noise, always at the exact same time every morning, at about 8 o'clock. Now, we live above a little market and a cafe, and we share the backyard of our building with both establishments so there is generally quite a bit of noise, especially in the morning when both places are opening up; there are people using the bins or taking rubbish out, unloading stock and emptying boxes, retrieving things from the store cupboard. So I always put this strange sound down to that general noise. However, it became clear that this noise was coming from above, not below, and it was unlike anything else we had heard. Also, because it started and stopped at a very particular time every single day, we struggled to find out what it was. It was my boyfriend who finally discovered the answer. He realised that the noise was a human voice and that the sound was actually an Islamic prayer! I had never heard this before and, now I know what the sound is, I really do find it amazing! Now we hear it each morning and it has become a symbol of our day too, like a call to wake up and get out of bed and start our day! This is definitely one of those times when I love having neighbours and getting to know a lifestyle that I have not come across before.
My final neighbour story (for now, at least) is also about a current upstairs neighbour and this one is quite emotional. Over the past year, we gathered that a young couple live above us, and it also became clear that they have quite a turbulent relationship. We have been awoken several times in the middle of the night by screaming and fighting and, on a few occassions, it has got so bad that my boyfriend has been on the point of getting involved. Then, one day a few months ago, there was a knock on our door and it was the yound girl. It surprised me to see that she was quite heavily pregnant - I had not ever actually seen her before. She was extremely nice and wanted to ask me if I could organise my violin practice to be at specific times during the day so that she could plan her rest around it. She explained that she was has having a difficult pregnancy, that it had been unexpected and that there was going to be a problem with the baby, but they didn't know exactly what yet. On top of that, she was only 24, still a student at university and working in a perfume shop in town. Of course, I felt huge empathy towards her and wanted to help her if I could, and she must have felt that she could trust me because she also started to tell me about her relationship with her boyfriend. He works in a pizza shop and so she never sees him, and when they do see each other at home they don't speak - communication completly broke down between them. Well, I have no real end to this story except that I have not seen her since and, for the first time last week, we heard a baby crying.
I guess, these stories show that there are just so many different lives going on all around us - everybody has their own shit to deal with, personal battles are being fought all the time and sometimes it can be a really good thing to step back from our own lives and take a closer look at those around us. There really is a wealth of variety in how people live and this is such a good thing. The question is, who really are your neighbours?
Follow my blog with BloglovinLabels: Life