Church Bells and Car Alarms

In Ecuador, the sun comes up at 6:30 in the morning. On the dot. The sun seems brighter here, because I find I can´t actually sleep past 7 or 7:30, no matter how hard I try to block out the light. It doesn´t help that the curtains in my room are like tissue paper, and barely block out Giovani, the creepy stalker-esque neighbor who likes to peer into our apartment, let alone the big shiny sun. As many of you know (or perhaps, everyone who has met me for more than five minutes), I am not a morning person. However, it´s not so bad to be woken up by the sun. What really gets me are the bloody car alarms that go off for hours a night, and the dang church bells. ARGH!! The car alarms are the most obnoxious, by far. It seems everyone who owns a car here, no matter how crappy, installs the most annoying car alarm on the market. In fact, the uglier the car, the more offensive the car alarm. They go off at all hours of the night, sometimes for up to half an hour! I want to drop rocks onto the stupid cars to teach them a lesson (don´t disrupt my beauty sleep!), and as I am about 10 stories up from the cars, it would do a fair bit of damage. Tempting. Then there are the churches. There are about four cathedrals in my immediate vicinity. And they all compete for parishioners by ringing the loudest bells. And they tend to start at around 6am. It would be fine if they all rang at once, and continued to ring through, because you can get used to continued noise, even if it´s loud and clangy. However, they ring for five minutes every fifteen or twenty minutes, all morning long. So, just as soon as you fall back asleep (because the sun hasn´t even come up yet!), the cacophony starts up again!

I think I need a sleeping mask and ear plugs.