Won't You Be My Neighbor?

I hear a child coughing upstairs right now. I wish I could take her my humidifier and a warm drink, some Vicks vapo rub and a few pillows to prop her up. It's strange to live in an apartment again, after having not done so since we were in Dallas 24 years ago! We hear the pitter patter of little feet sometimes as late as 11:30...and I DO mean "little". They run across the floor like they're playing a game. Kevin and I lay in bed and say, "I think I'm going upstairs to tuck those kids into bed!" I think two of our neighbors upstairs have pianos. It's hard to tell, but I think the music comes from two different spots...one above our kitchen, and one above our living room. We hear the same songs over and over again as different people practice. We can tell different ones are practicing, because the music goes from flowing and beautiful, to choppy and irritating! I had a delightful surprise the other day....a new song! I haven't heard it again. Bummer. It must've been a visitor. It was absolutely beautiful and well-played. I thought it was a recording at first until I heard a tiny mess-up. This piano thing is another thing that Kevin and I joke about. "I'm going to go buy some new piano music and take it up to our neighbors!"

I recently was shaking our big rug which sits by our door to capture everyone's boots and shoes. I shake it out over our balcony. (Now, I know "balcony" sounds very romantic and beautiful, but ban any thoughts of a place you'd put a table and chairs with a nice gas grill. No, "balcony" in this case is a 3' X 10' cement hunk jutting out from our kitchen door. It has cement walls that come up to my waist and it seems like a very unsafe situation for children since there's no lock on the door. I wouldn't like this if I had small children!) So, back to the day I was shaking out our rug. I snapped the rug hard, it buckled, and it flew out of my hand. My heart sunk...and so did the rug. Remember, we live on the 6th floor. On the third floor, there is a roof which juts out to cover the floors below. I watched as our big, black rug swayed back and forth in the wind as it sailed down to the third floor roof. I popped back into the kitchen and said to Kevin, "Guess what I just did?" I proceeded to tell him the story. He wasn't too excited to try to deal with this situation. I wasn't either. I figured the rug wasn't going anywhere too fast, so I decided to wait until Saraa came for her English practice in a couple hours.

Later, she arrived, and as I let her in, I said, "Will you pleeeeeeeeeese do me a favor?" She looked eager. I explained the situation, and we hopped on the elevator. I felt so good to have my security blanket....a Mongolian speaker! So we went to the third floor, knocked on the door, and soon had a man at the door. He was around 50 years old and looked like we might've disturbed a nice Sunday afternoon nap. Saraa launched into telling my story, I smiled with friendliness, and he had understanding creep onto his face. He shook his head and left the door to go back into the apartment. I heard a door out to his roof open and he soon appeared with my rug. I smiled, gave a slight nod of my head, and said "Byerkthlah, byerkthlah!" (thank you, thank you!) and Saraa and I both waved and turned to head up to our apartment again with rug in hand. Since then, I've seen him get off the elevator on the main floor once and he gave me a hearty, "Sain bain oooo!" (Hi, how are you). I would guess his English is zilch, or he would've said something.

I'm 99% sure that we're the only non-Mongolians in our whole 12-floor apartment. I've never seen a foreigner (that's what we are) other than us and our friends. I guess it's pretty well known that the foreigners live on 6th floor, as we recently had a gathering, and our American friends came in saying they had gone to the wrong floor, and the residents just saw their faces and pointed up and said, "zorga" (six)! Hilarious!