Christmas Parties
On Friday night we went to a party just outside the city of Cancun. It was the home a a local expat and he’d just finished building it this past spring. The house is at the edge of the jungle and it seems like a serene place to live. I noticed that I could see the milky way clearly and could hear the chattering of myriad forest creatures. And there were no neighbors for the party noise to bother.
We had a great time and the hours flew by. Suddenly it was 3:30 in the morning. I was stunned, I had lost about 4 hours, I must have been really enjoying myself. A group of us left the party in two cars and made our way to downtown Cancun where we stopped off for another beer (I had orange juice since I was driving). I was impressed to see just how much traffic there is in Cancun at 4 am, we had to struggle to find parking. My husband and I finally made our way home at 5:30 am, which is when we’d gotten up the day before, making it a 24 hour day for us. We crawled into bed and stayed there until 3 pm Saturday (yesterday).
Then last night, Christmas eve, just as we were going to bed, our neighbors started having a loud party. Their guests filled the street with cars, parking us in so we couldn’t get our car out. Then they lugged a karaoke machine into their backyard and cranked it up. Since we live in the center of Cancun when a neighbor has a loud party it bothers many, many people.
But these people were seemingly unconcerned with the effect their party had on others. As the night grew longer they turned the volume up and up. By 5 am it was loud enough to wake the dead and they’d run out of tacky Mexican music for the karaoke machine and had started to repeat the songs. My neighbor is a doctor but I can tell he wishes he could have been a Mexican version of that old crooner Lawrence Welk. The neighbor himself dominated the microphone, belting out more than half of the songs himself, about half of them off key. It’s hard for me to imagine liking anyone enough to voluntarily listen to that nasty singing for that many hours. But the reality is that it was not voluntary for me, and I do not like this man much anyway, so all in all it was pretty much torture for me to put up with that party. It was impossible to sleep but staying awake meant hearing all that awful warbling! Finally at 7 am this morning they turned off the karaoke machine, but even now, one hour later, I still hear laughter and people talking loudly over there. It looks to me like all my neighbors will be sleeping away most of Christmas day since we were all up all night.
