My Life in Loud

Thailand is loud. My kids are loud, the cars are loud, the dogs and cats are loud, the music is loud. Life is loud.

Every morning the construction starts at around 5:30 am. There is sawing, and jackhammering, and yelling in Thai. Moments later, the roosters start. And the roosters must speak Thai as well, because they definitely do not say "cock a doodle doo." While walking to school the songthaews honk their horns to every person they pass. Once on the songthaew, someone is buzzing the buzzer every few hundred meters to get on and off. The motorbikes buzz by. Once at school I usually have about 5 minutes of quiet in the staff room, and the music begins. At 7:30 every morning the Thai music is blared over the speaker system throughout campus. The students begin to pour in. They scream. And they yell. Everyone is so loud! At 8 am we line up and walk to our morning ceremony. Over 3200 students and 300 teachers gather in the quad for the "morning parade." The students stand in lines and recite certain prayers, sayings, and sing. And boy, do they sing! They scream the national anthem, the king's song and the school's song. The principal then makes what feels like hours of announcements while we bake in the morning sun and the speakers make my ears ring. After the never ending announcements and daily award ceremonies, it is time for morning exercise. The entire school spends about 6 minutes doing some type of activity in lines. Some days it is aerobics, other days it is Thai dancing and other days it is some crazy aerobic, dancing, kickboxing combo. After that the school turns into a mad house for the rest of the day. Children sprint back to their rooms, yelling and stomping. There is no separation between the classroom time and play time, so school is controlled chaos. In my classroom, I'm still working on the controlled part of the controlled chaos, but I have faith that it'll happen.

After school the noise only grows. Almost every store front has music or a television blaring. Even the open night market is completely wired and everyone is watching their individual televisions on maximum volume to compete with their neighbors. By this time the advertising trucks have also begun to loop the city. They trucks drive around the city blasting Thai advertisements and playing Shakira "She Wolf" on repeat. A truck drives by my apartment every 20 minutes without fail.

By bedtime, my upstairs neighbors start to get noisy. I can only imagine what is going on up there, because we all have the same exact setups. There is nothing that can be moved, yet it sounds like they are constantly moving furniture. The advertising trucks continue into the night, and the dogs begin to howl and fight.

It's a noisy place over here. Luckily, I invested in earplugs!

PS- There are a few imbedded links, so check them out!