Noise

So we leapt across the country, from Cartagena in the north, to Popayan in the south, a town that our Lonely Planet guide made sound like a whitewashed romantic village. (I am a bit cynical about the Lonely Planet.) It is true that Popayan's historic district is painted all white, but it is not particularly romantic. It is thronged with people, cars, and motorbikes that scream at you with loud beeps. Streets are narrow, built for horses (which you still see here); sidewalks are even narrower. Colombia does not dedicate large portions of its centros to pedestrians, as Mexico does, and traffic rules.

If there's traffic noise outside, there's usually music inside. So I'm sitting here, even in the hostel where we're staying, wearing Barry's super-duper earphones that block out a lot of noise. It's astonishing, the difference. Noise is the one external stimulus I seem to have no power over; I get so agitated by it. Last night, in our former hotel, I barely slept, between the traffic noise and coffee.

I remember meeting a couple in the Bay Area years ago who told me their dream was to retire somewhere in the calmer, less competitive underdeveloped world, away from high-stress Silicon Valley. "Calmer? Are you kidding?" I said. "Cars without mufflers? Noise? Crowds?"

I asked Barry his engineer's opinion on why there is so much less noise on U.S. streets. "American streets are wider," he said.

"But in Old Town (where we live in Eureka) they're narrow," I argued. Still, we have less traffic in Eureka than we've seen in most Colombian towns, and cars move more slowly. Motorbikes, the poor person's mode of transit, make a lot of noise.

I do not know whether Latinos love sound intrinsically, or have just grown used to it. I do remember a Spanish teacher in Oaxaca years ago telling me that while she went through her daily activities, she had to have some kind of background sound, silence was unbearable. I'm the opposite. I'm probably one of the most a-musical people I know. No wonder this part of the world brings up challenges for me!