Hay Bulla

Noise is part of life everywhere. The more accustomed to a place we become, the more all the noise fades together to form a backdrop that grounds our daily activities in something familiar. Eventually, we stop noticing many of the sounds, but they're still there.
At night I like to try to tell time based on sound. Life in the street— moto taxis and buses passing, children screaming, people talking, hawking their food products, houses blasting music out into the road— starts to die down around 10:30 or 11:00. 11:00-2:00 a.m is the dominion of drunks and dog fights, of cats running across roofs, all of which give way to a brief period of near silence around 3:00 a.m. Sometimes the silence is broken by wave-like rounds of rooster calls. The people here say that when an animal is making noise at a time that isn't its own it's because someone is going to die. The roosters' time starts around 4:00 or 4:30. That gives them an hour to themselves, that they only need share with the early bus that honks its arrival, before the tortilla man, the egg lady, and the trucks sounding the day's advertisements through speakers piled in thir beds fill the morning with their messages.
The day is harder to classify because there are so many sources of sound. The clip-clop of ox hooves compete with cars and taxis, whistles, music, dogs chasing bicycles, trucks buying scrap metal, selling cheese, pigs squeeling, recess at the instituto, bombas launched from metal tubes to celebrate...something, thunder in the distance. Sometimes, however, it rains and the rain washes away everything else. It washes away the dirt and trash in the street, all the animals run and hide, the people retire to their houses and the myriad sources are replaced by the snare-drum cadence of raindrops on a tin roof. Even conversation stops when it gets too loud to talk in the house. Then the rain stops, as quick as it began, and all the noise begins to rise again to fill the void.
Hay bulla. Siempre hay bulla.