It's up too loud

It's about 2am, I'm getting ready to hit the sack, and as my ear touches the pillow, I hear a familiar sound I've come to loathe: the pumping bass lines of techno music from my neighbor downstairs. The walls (and floors, apparently) really are paper thin around here. The kids outside make noise in the morning, trucks with megaphones playing pre-recorded audio advertisements (that would doubtless be considered noise disturbances in America), and sometimes this guy directly beneath me plays his music and it wakes me up earlier than I like. Until now I've left it all as somethings I have to deal with, have put in earplugs or whatever, although they don't help much with vibrations coming from beneath...

It's one of those things that's immensely harder than it should be: knocking on the door of someone you don't know in the wee hours of the morning to say they are being too loud. In America I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd first file a noise complaint - in fact, when I used to be in a band at the age of 15, we had just that happen to us and the cops shut us down several times practicing in my drummer's living room. But that's neither here nor there.

I've pondered the idea of telling him to turn down his techno re-re-mixes at 8:30 in the morning, but since the signs say "keep quiet 11pm-7am," and I usually should be getting up anyway, I've brushed it off. But this is 2 freakin' AM, and definitely a bit out of line. This dude has got some serious subwoofers, that's for sure.

I make my way out, seeing a dead baby roach in the hallway and taking that as a sign of just how lovely this guesthouse really is. (as an aside, there's some kind of 3 foot square basin outside my window, presumably for catching and draining rain, with two curled up dead roaches, apparently done in by a heavy rain yesterday. Yuck.) So I knocked on his door and at first I think he questioned hearing it. Then I knocked again, and he answered. His face looked bewildered at the very sight of me, which is what I expected. I politely said in Japanese - or maybe only half-assed politely - that the noise was too loud, and he apologized, I bade him good night and hopefully we never have to do this little dance again. But I have a feeling he'll be back to his old ways in the near future.

Oh, and speaking of old, you'd expect this to be some college student, but the dude is an (apparently single?) mid-40s-looking guy. Total shocker the first time I saw him. Anyways, off to bed now, the city is sleeping and now so can I.

"It's too @$%&ing loud" - Acid bath.