but in Spain it's as if the buildings are built with zero soundproofing - you hear every single neighbor in the whole building and their tvs, radios, conversations, footsteps... it's maddening, I don't understand it
Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailing all the ways in which noise in Spanish cities was deleterious to health & wellbeing and asking why no-one ever did anything about it. Constant noise just seems to be accepted as being an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be fixed.
Living there you kind of get used to it.
That's my experience as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell apart if there's a bar brawl happening on the pub down the road or if it's a grou having a good time. It also doesn't help that in both cases Spaniards curse like crazy.
corrected for you :)
Other than that though...!
I had to chuckle when reading this, although I would point out that not all neighbourhoods are the same. Still, every spaniard knows that trying to call the local police because there is some idiot throwing a party at 1AM is pointless.
The truck then came crashing down the street a little later...
(I lived in Spain for two years.)
Totally. I think to them it represents and demonstrates liberation, freedom, fun, family and community. Loud means fun to them.
People complaining about noise are seen as serious party-poopers.
Do you (or: do people usually) exclude Madrid from Castilla? That's the only place in Spain I've lived and would not class the people I knew as quiet and calm. But then again it's a melting pot of people from all over Spain, so who knows!
And the calmest and quietest people I met were from the east coast :D
Definitely agree about Andalusia though
It's not the same having to live in a small town in Castile of <2000 people vs doing that the literal capital of Spain.
Or maybe I have a very stereotyped, very local experience that came from going mostly where all the other tourists go. and I'm wildly extrapolating from here about the rest of the country.
Maybe the older houses are the only available places to rent in some cities when you are young, because they are old and creaky, so still affordable. Does this mean that every Spanish family live in old, poorly insulated houses? Hem, not.
Is true that Mediterranean coast and Canary Islands care less about proper insulation. The north and center is different.
Is Madrid louder than London, Athens, new Dehli, Los Angeles or Pekin? I'm very skeptical about it.
It just happens that big cities, sport events, drinking areas and heavy traffic streets are noisy places. Here and in Australia. If you go where the drunkards join; expect to meet a lot of drunkards. But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
Same in small white villages in Andalucía. That is because they are populated mostly by old people that spend their day in front of their TV and barely want to walk anywhere. But once every 30 minutes whole village is woken up by the local teenager, the scream of his moped echoing in all the narrow streets. And if some people are talking you bet they are all shouting at each other.
I've lived in a few different flats in the UK, all purpose built flats. I already knew flats in converted houses are generally terrible. I've been in some where you can hear everything your neighbour is up to. I'm not sure what's worse: hearing them or knowing they can hear you too.
In two of them I could never hear a peep from the neighbours apart from footsteps on the floor upstairs. But seriously wondered if the neighbours ever made any noise at all, or whether it was just that well soundproofed.
In my most recent flat, though, it's terrible. You can hear conversations through the floor but what's worse is when people make direct contact with walls/ceilings, like closing curtains or closing doors, it's like they are in your room. And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.
I do also wonder if it was really an illusion as the first two flats were in noisier areas. But, whatever the reason, it's so hard to tell what it's going to be like before moving in. I wish there standards so you could guarantee what it's going to be like.
But until then, I will be seeking detached housing because I just can't stand the noise.
The noise is coming in through the holes made to put plumbing - especially district heating.
In my current apartment the owner wanted to conceal the piping, so he hid it behind an enclosure made out of plaster with a service hatch.
The whole thing is currently a resonance chamber that lets me follow my dowstairs neighbour's conversations.
I'm not sure about the problem with direct contact with walls/ceilings, though. I suspect this is more down to the construction and the walls/ceiling being directly attached to the concrete shell, or something.
Costs less to build, sells for the same money, more profit made.
Cities in southern Europe are generally denser than what the communists built and to me this is simply too much.
I remember staying in Bilbao and the garbage truck waking me up on each garbage day because its sound bounced back and forth between the walls and some genius thought it would be a good idea to have it do its run during the night.
Meanwhile back at home if it weren't for a construction site that propped up recently there would have been at least 70 meters to the building next to mine.