Sunday 1 December 2013

Living in a gold-fish bowl

There are some odd sides to being an expat. One of the trickiest aspects to navigate is what another expat termed `being thrown in a gold fish bowl with a bunch of people you'd never normally associate with.' And Boy! Was she right!
Don't get me wrong, I have met some wonderful people and made some friends who shall be friends forever, but I have also had to hang out with people I really, really don't like. And it's a tricky path to tread.
We are all sort-of thrown together by virtue of being foreign to the country and also because we don't speak Portuguese. The English speaking school communities are quite small and so, of necessity, tend to come into contact a lot. But worst of all on the scale of tricky social paths is living in a gated expat community.
We have 12 houses in our little complex. At the moment, two of the houses are empty and we wait in trepidation to see what comes along.In the mean time, we are forced to be nice to the other expats. The ones whose children ring the doorbell incessantly, the ones who park their car in our driveway, the ones who hog the pool all weekend.
We have been here for two years-ish. Our first neighbours, the closest ones, were neighbours from hell. During the day, he'd be off working and she'd be inside and quiet, but come 6 o'clock the loud conversations would start with the `sal jy a stukkie vleis eet?' (will you eat a piece of meat?) I kid you not, this would happen five out of seven nights. How they managed to not die of heart attacks after eating all that meat is beyond me! Any-way, the real test of neighbourliness was reserved for weekends when the boere musiek (a version of South African country and western) would be switched on at roughly 9p.m. and would belt out until at least 11. They got trashed with boring regularity and screamed loud Afrikaans hilarity virtually outside our window. They asked to borrow stuff and then returned said stuff weeks later after being harassed. The most annoying was when they borrowed the dog crate we imported our dog in. The crate was made for the dog and was fairly expensive. DB, in his neighbourly ignorance, allowed the neighbours from hell to borrow the crate `overnight'. Almost a month later, after persistent nagging, DB went and fetched the crate himself. AND, because we live in a teeny-weeny little community, we still smiled politely and made small-talk.
So what, you might ask, has prompted this outpouring of irritation over expat neighbours? Well, last night, after sitting round the pool with most of the people from the complex and making polite conversation, we had an almighty storm and a tree in our garden was split asunder. (I must add, at this point, that I have laboured in this garden, turning it from something extremely ugly into something that is sort-of inviting.) The tree mashed the garden, but miraculously missed a newly planted lavender bush (which is a whole other story about dogged labour...), although it managed to squish a poor toad hiding in the grass and shredded a yesterday-today-and-tomorrow. But the lavender was ok! DB spent the better part of the morning cutting up the tree so that we could move it. Then he went to sleep at which point our neighbours, different to the ones from hell, but literally from the same geographic origins, chucked over branches of the tree which had landed on their side of the wall. No attempt to break down the branches, no attempt to miss the flowerbeds, no attempt to tell us their intent. Just hoiked them over the wall, crushing my lavender bush.
This gold-fish bowl is feeling awfully small....

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