Meeting the Neighbors

Somehow, we haven’t yet mentioned our upstairs neighbors on this blog. Mostly because we didn’t want to seem like the stereotypical whiny American tourist. For the most part, our building is wonderful, the neighborhood is wonderful, and our apartment is wonderful...with the exception of our upstairs neighbors, whom we lovingly refer to as Vlad and Veeter. You see, Vlad and Veeter are obsessed with Lady Gaga. O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D. I have the feeling that some of you back in the USA, on a cold, quiet night might occasionally hear the faint tune of ‘Just Dance’ drifting to your ears from somewhere more eastward. It’s Vlad & Veeter coming to you live from the Rua da Bica de Duarte Belo in Lisbon.

Coming to Europe, we knew that we would have to acclimate ourselves to a lot of things and the noise of Lisbon was prime among them. I had even thought about writing a blog earlier this week about how we’ve acclimated ourselves to the noise now, finally. But tonight, we just couldn’t take any more Lady Gaga, so I finally decided to knock on V&V’s door and say something. To my surprise, even my most caricatured mental image of what V & V would look like didn’t do it justice. I was met at the door by a pleasant young man of about 30 years old, wearing underwear. Tighty whiteys to be exact. Oh, and a necklace in the shape of the cross to complete the outfit. Even more fitting, his name was indeed Jesús. So here I am, already nervous about overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers, trying to avert my eyes from the bulge in Vlad...sorry, Jesús’s tighty-whiteys while introducing myself. And yes, for those wondering, we did indeed shake hands.

As it turns out, Jesús was a nice enough gentleman and was more than happy to turn down the music, telling me to just knock on his door whenever it was a problem for us. So that problem was solved. Unfortunately I now have a new problem: every time that I hear Lady Gaga from now on, I’ll be able to think of nothing but Jesús and the tighty whiteys.