Skip to main content

Sounds of New York City


To me New York City is associated with a constant barrage of sounds. My heater makes a racket at least once an hour for ten minutes while it spews and spits steam to warm my room enough that I have the window open even in January. When the heater isn’t making a racket, my fridge is buzzing and thrumming.

This is not to mention the sounds that come from outside. Sirens are a constant (though blessedly not between 10pm-7am for some reason). And loudest are the garbage men who come twice a day (some times) and bring with them sounds of yelling, the whirring of the truck and banging that all carry to my ninth floor room. They can come any time between 7 or 8 in the morning and often spur me to go work out earlier than I might have to get away from the noise.

At night, between my heater and fridge there is constant noise while I sleep. One night when I lay awake in my bed, I suddenly realized that the room was completely quiet. No sounds coming from outside, no heater spitting and no fridge thrumming. I ran away to Finland over break chasing this very silence (admittedly, New York cannot compete with Finland for silence) but when my room was so quiet my only thought was “What if the heater’s broken?”.

Sometime this past week though, I noticed a different sound in my room. A sound that seemed to be coming from my kitchen and could only be described as scratching. Yet during the day I could never hear the sound and when I checked my cabinets at night there was nothing unusual. So my worrying mind jumped to termites: I imagined termites burrowing deep in the wood and having my cabinet bottom collapse one day becasue of their tunneling. When I ran this theory by my parents my mother immediately said it wasn’t possible.

Just as I was starting to think that perhaps I needed to have someone look into what the cause was, I heard the sound again, but this time it sounded like the rustling of a bag. There’s only one cabinet that contains bags so I went straight to it and opened it with more than a little trepidation. As much as I wanted to know what it was, I was scared of what I would find (my worst fear was be finding something dead, or that flew in my face).

Confirming that the sound was indeed coming from the cabinet, I decided to search my room for stick to rustle the bag. Unsuccessful, I went back to the cabinet and at that precise moment, I saw the source of the rustling and scratching.

A mouse. A cute, adorable, tiny mouse. And so I screamed and promptly shut the cabinet door.
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finnish Differences

Time is a funny thing. It seems to move in leaps and bounds at times and at times it moves slower than molasses. Right now it's doing both. I can't believe it's only been a week and yet I can't believe it's already been a week. Sunset in Helsinki This week I've been in Helsinki for our Fulbright orientation. We learned a lot of information and it would be impossible for me to fit all of it into a reasonable amount of space so I will leave that summary for another day. But a week has given me some time to notice some differences in how things work in Finland and how they work in the US. I thought I would highlight five here that encompass a fair variety of my experiences so far. I have to give credit to my friend Marie who helped me with this list. Many of these are her ideas. 1. Nature is Everywhere This one is first because I think it is the most important one for Finns. Finnish people love nature and it shows in the way cities are built (at least th...
5 comments
Read more

A Few of my Favorite Things

I just came back from a trip to Estonia. It was my first trip where I was completely alone the entire time. No travel companions, no friend anticipating my arrival, no one else dictating my schedule, unless you count my rather overbearing couchsurfing host. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is a pretty town to visit but I think the biggest thing I learned was that I prefer traveling with people. Places are more fun to see and food is more fun to eat when the experience is shared. That being said, I don’t think I would have done what turned out being my favorite thing from the trip if I had had anyone else with me: taking pictures of doors. To be clear, these aren’t just any doors. They are colorful and happy. Each door I saw was unique, either in color scheme or detailing. Here are a few examples: And here is a collage of some of my pictures put together.  I took 30 door pictures so this is only about half. This whole project started when I chan...
1 comment
Read more

Happy Vappu!

There aren’t many events that bring throngs of Finnish people together. Finns tend to avoid situations where they have to be with many people at once. This is a country, after all, where they sit one per row on the bus even when traveling with friends and hold their time in their summer cottages as sacred. But Vappu is one of those exceptions to the rule. I admittedly have been avoiding Vappu all week. We’ve had plenty of emails telling us about all of the parties and events going on around campus. Every one of these promises copious amounts of alcohol. This is decidedly not my scene and so I resolved to skip Vappu altogether. That resolve did not take long to thaw away. Curiosity got the best of me. In the most basic sense, Vappu is like Labor Day in the US. It is meant to honor those who work by giving everyone a day off. But it also heralds spring and after the long Finnish winter, everyone in Finland is ready for color and life to come back. The first par...
Post a Comment
Read more