Sensory Overload

Life in any major city is sensory overload. Bright lights, honking cars, rumbling buses, banging construction, and the all-too-frequent whiff of something rotting or sewage-like. If you're a city person, this is part of what you love.

The tropics have their own kind of sensory overload. This morning I woke up to the most amazing cacophony of birds: aside from the standard cheep-cheep tweet-tweet variety, which were deafening on their own, there is a shocking variety of tone, song, and melody. My favorite are the woop-woops, whose deep and resonating, er, woop, is totally distinctive from all the other higher pitched tralalas of the songbirds. I was surprised to find the sex bird here too. I have no idea what the bird actually looks like, but when one lived outside Mom's apartment in Hong Kong she was desperate to get rid of it because it kept waking her up early in the morning. The call rises in pitch, intensity and frequency, and is remarkably similar to what you would hear if your neighbors got it on at 6a.m. every morning. If you ever hear it, you'll know what I mean.

Then there are the colors, which after the grayness of Beijing winter make me almost wince, they're so bright. The different blues of the sea and sky, the lush greenness of plant life that bursts from every possible surface. And the smells! Sweet honeysuckle whose perfume, I'm convinced, could actually make you drunk. The air is so heavy with warmth and wetness and sea and smells it is a joy to just breathe.

Every once in a while I imagine what it would be like to live in a place like this, and then remember that you can only love it this much if you don't come very often. Or so I tell myself.