If you think how different it is to live on another continent, surrounded by a bunch of people from all over the world… One can be sure to find “those” kind of neighbors anywhere.
Those who walk exclusively on their heels and let their children jump and scream in the middle of the night. That family surely lives above you, of course.
Then there are also those who brew and burn some sort of stews day and night. Burnt onions and god knows what else from early morning till evening, as if they haven’t heard of “make a large pot for 3 days and give it a rest!” They live next door to us.
How do I know that? It took me quite a long time to figure out why we have to suffer whenever the neighbors get busy in their kitchen. At first I suspected that the smell was coming from our AC if we turned it on. That black onion essence was often so strong that we detected it even downstairs outside our building. We haven’t turned on the air conditioning for some time now, because the weather is so pleasant, our window open can be open practically all day.
Then it happened the other day, a distant memory of our neighbors from my childhood came to me. My family lived in an apartment building in Ljubljana then. Those were some next level special folks, like from a movie, I’ll withhold which genre for now.
I mention to Tamer how they were the only ones in our building with a tactic to open their balcony AND the front door to the hallway of the building whenever they were making some very stinky goulash type of dishes. It meant a nice and fast ventilation for them, but fumigation for all the rest, who needed to enter or leave their apartments in the next couple of hours.
If you, dear reader, do the same, then I am here to tell you that there is a special place in hell for the likes of you.
My husband had never heard of such a thing, of course he didn’t believe me. Then it had to happen, as always, when I’m right. Under our badly sealed front door, I sensed that familiar war gas creeping inside. I called Tamer to come see and theatrically opened the door to the hallway. We peered into the open apartment of our neighboring chefs.
Of course, my moment of victory “I told you so” did not last long. By practical demonstration we let even more pungent odors into our apartment, so we had to close the door pretty quickly.
Do you also have any neighbors from hell? If not, are you one of them?