The Insane Urban Noise Pollution

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Cats mating, dogs barking, traffic, fighting couples, my horrible roommates, ect. Taipei is SO noisy. How do you get sleep????
I was told to get ear plugs. but they dont’ work so well. I still get kept awake. Also they cause ear pain.
SO how do you deal with noise? Any bright ideas?

(source : Forumosa)

Let me add a few items to that list – construction, 500cc motorbikes, garbage trucks, okay – any truck, air conditioners compressors and car alarms. No, it’s not only in Taipei, it’s everywhere – it’s here in  Jerusalem. Whenever I visit my parents’ place, I can’t sleep beyond 6am, which is a problem since I usually go to sleep at around 1-2 in the morning, that is – if no alarm went off during the night or some a$$hole decided to gas through the street. 6am, the garbage trucks come to pick up the garbage, so they won’t bother the traffic later on during the day, and then, at around 7, construction starts. I think that for the past 10 years, the street has always had at least one building under construction, and starting from 7am, they start do all the heavy lifting drilling for the rest of the day. At around 7:20am, the first bus passes through the street. And let me assure you that we’re talking about a nice relatively quiet neighborhood.

Here’s Laowiseass with another list:

1. Firecrackers. Imagine a car falling off a 20-story building and hitting the street under your face. Every five seconds. 24 hours a day. 15 days straight from Lunar New Year’s Eve. Is your new year happy yet? (Paper, sticks and other firecracker refuse should be left in the street, by the way, because as we all know in Chinese societies, someone else will come along to pick that up.)
2. Indoor demolition. Someone clobbering a wall to pieces in the flat below you so he can rebuild it.
3. Outdoor demolition. Mechanized wrecking of outdoor buildings; brick walls for maximum effect.
4. Earth ramming. Quake? No. Construction equipment thumping the crap out of the ground.
5. Unloading of iron. Trucks dropping scaffolding bars or pipes onto pavement.
6. Indoor drilling. Comes across as someone’s day-after burrito and beer fart straight in your face, even if it’s on a remodeling site six floors below you.
7. Indoor hammering. Remodeling noise in packed apartment and office buildings that ranges in pitch from a faint knock at your door to a battering ram on your ceiling.
8. Road-surface digging. Common jackhammers meters away from common apartment buildings.
9. Metallic screeching. Welding. Soldering. Metal slicing. The sound eeks across streets, parks and school yards to penetrate your window-sealed living room.
10. Idling trucks. The running engines of big rigs parked in dense neighborhoods shake homes and offices as they wait for a haul.

Living in Tainan, I’d have to add a few other incredible sources of noise I’ve never imagined before. Garbage trucks, aside from turning the trash with their diesel engines, do the famous foreigner favorite “ice cream” routine for almost two hours every day between 6pm to 8pm. During the weekends, there is no way of sleeping in my apartment as every single week some God or temple has a birthday and an unbelievable commotion of fireworks and what I can only describe as the most inharmonic sound in the world which some call “traditional Chinese music” comes into play. Some nights, one of the 7 temples near my apartment decides to put on Taiwanese opera or rocket puppet show at around 11pm-1am.

Here’s something familiar from the Taiwan Pirate :

If you haven’t lived in Taiwan, you don’t know what noise is. […]

In Taiwan, the idea is to make so much goddamn noise that the gods can’t possibly ignore you. (Well, this isn’t exactly true, in Taiwan they bring the ‘gods’ and the religious icons out of the temples are parade around, so they are actually making all that goddamn noise so that you don’t ignore the gods.)
Picture 50 teenager boys with 8foot long trumpets (with 12inch bells for stronger vibrations) 15 10foot drums, 20 10foot gongs, about 100 whiny Asian clarinets, all hooked up to loudspeakers plugged into a massive battery that they wheel around on a cart behind the procession.
Now picture this going by your house at 6:30 am, and winding up and down all the streets of your city until mid-afternoon. There is simply no escaping the noise.
That’s not to mention the ‘firecrackers’ (ie sticks of dynamite) that they set off by the thousands. Just now I swear the were setting off anti-aircraft mortars. I could see the puffs of gray smoke in the air, and feel the vibrations as the shockwave from the explosions pounded through the city blocks.
WOW.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore this culture stuff in Taiwan and in a way – it’s why I’m living in Taiwan, but it’s there – constantly, and you just can’t get used to it. Culture? great, but maybe it can be limited till 12pm, like pubs are. Garbage trucks always been that way? don’t tell me that people who adjusted to become one of the world’s top recycling societies can’t give up the garbage truck noise system.

(Hmm… I wonder what noise Taiwanese suffer from the most when living in Jerusalem.)

There are some things that the government tries to do, but anywhere – I find the so call regulations just ridiculous :

Noise Control Act, Chapter 2, Article 6:

Engaging in the following activities that jeopardize the quietness of the lives of others within noise control zones is prohibited.

• The ignition of fireworks at times, in areas or on premises officially announced by the competent authority
• The holding of such folk activities as god alter worship, temple festivals, and weddings and funerals at times, in areas or on premises officially announced by the competent authority
• The conduct of such activities as food and beverage business, laundering and dying, printing, or other commercial activities that use automated machinery at times, in areas or on premises officially announced by the competent authority
• Other activities officially announced by the competent authority

Noise Control Act, Chapter 2, Article 16:

Those that violate Article 6 shall be fined NT$3,000 to NT$30,000 and shall be ordered to promptly make improvements; those that fail to comply shall be fined per violation.

Terrific. That just solves it.

Some days, I can go absolutely insane, which – happily for you – isn’t as violent as it maybe should be. Happened once or twice that after really horrible sleepless nights I drove out of the city and found a quiet motel-room to sleep in.

Which is why I LOVE this next movie which I just finished watching, that should have got a lot more attention than it really did.

“What –I- don’t understand, is how people put up with it”.

How do we put up with it?