I can honestly say I’ve never had so many problems during a finals period trying to get some peace and quiet to focus, do my work, and get decent sleep at a reasonable hour than I’ve had here in central but definitely rural Taiwan.
At night, despite lights automatically going out at midnight, it’s hard to get any real sleep. And yes, the lights get shut off at 12 on the dot. Starting around 11PM, though, you get drunken partiers fighting in the yard beside my dorm (I’m on the top floor, and I’ve heard some really stupid shit go down), crazed cheering at all hours (I assume for school events of some sort in the undergrad division, but not sure why they’d go until 1 or 2AM), and of course birds that are peculiarly loud at night instead of day.
You’d think eventually there’d be quiet long enough to get some sleep. Nope. At 4AM the neighborhood dogs go nuts. Roosters start crowing - multiple ones, and then in between barking that fades in the distance (I assume someone rounds up the strays and takes them away), motorcycles rev up to get people to work.
So just sleep in, you might say. Hah. With the dawn comes the pigeon coos at frightening mutant volumes - I’m not kidding, when you can hear a pigeon cooing from across the hall past several doors and over your aircon, those things are abnormal.
And of course, you have classes and things to do during the day, so you can’t sleep in during the quietest part of the day - 10AM through 3PM is the quietest in the dorms, with noisy punctuations of people coming back from and going to class at either end of the lunch hour.
It’s not much better in the school buildings, where I try to arrive early on weekends so I can take advantage of the quiet as everyone sleeps in and slumps about. However, this...has not always worked. Some students see the weekend daylight hours of quiettime as their time to muck about.
As I write, we’re going into hour 6 of a group of students playing music loudly downstairs in the photography studio. They’re recording a music video. And playing their instruments. And singing. I know every spot in the tune where the drummer loses his timing because the lead singer pauses too long. The drumming reverberates through my feet and chair. The caterwauling hook in the chorus A leading to chorus B is consistently offtune with a lot of not-pretty scooping that always goes flat.
Gotta love finals month here. Half of my due dates were suddenly bumped up by a week or even two despite what the syllabi I have for those classes say, so I’m stressed enough trying to find the time to get everything done when I’d planned for more time. (Pro-tip - the Taiwanese love to change things last minute; it’s interesting comparing their lax sense of time and nil deadline urgency with American ‘time is money’ pacing.)
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