Now how surreal is this? I'm sat, working and all I can hear from outside is Neil Sedaka, playing away on someone's car stereo!

Bizarre. It's another of those 'things' that has held back my adjustment to city living - the bloody noise. It's relentless, morning, noon and night. The thing is, I also recgonise that this is not exclusive to living in Lisbon. It's a direct consequence of living in any city, anywhere.

From conversations (the Portuguese like to talk loudly) to cars, music to dogs, the general comings and going of people around the aprtment I live in - it's never ending.

A curious thing that continues to snag my attention  - because I can hear it every damn night - is the trash men collecting from trashcans around the city. They do this in the middle of the night. Six nights a week. I'm reliably informed that no-one (here) likes to have much to do with trash, other than throw it away, so the trash wagon is rolled out á noite, in order to surreptitiously remove the waste and detritus from the streets of Lisbon.

Now, I don't know about you but the word 'surreptitious' would indicate that some kind of stealth is employed. I'm thinking that the Portuguese misunderstand the meaning of the word. Or they do but they simply like the sound of it.

Because the nightly trash collection is anything but quiet and stealthy. The wagons run at full throttle, so it always sounds as though there's a Sherman tank trundling down the street. The trashmen talk with wild abandon - and the decibels that their random chatter achieves is equally wild.

On top of that, every bin is thrown around with great gusto, so in and among the gutteral emissions from the tank  trashwagaon and the gabble of the guys working the trash, is the persistant cacophony of plastic and metal meeting with grinding regularity. It's almost like a crazy, orchestral maneouvre - in the dark.

There's a distinct lack of direction - no conductor in sight - but the highs and lows are almost akin to one of Mozart's symphonies. Only it's not quite as pleasant on the ears. Being a lover of classical music and a former ballet dancer, I can appreciate the beauty and symphony of a Bach concerto or anything created by Schubert but ... the trash can whallop of the mid-nightly orchestral machinations of Lisbons trash collecters escapes me.

Ever so slightly.

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