At it morning, noon and night

We don't hear much from our next-door neighbours, the ones who we share our living room and bedroom walls with. No talking, no laughing, no loud music or TV... I think it partly has to do with the better quality of the walls in these houses. In the first house I lived in in Amsterdam, the walls, and especially the ceiling/floor, were much thinner; we could hear nearly everything from our upstairs neighbour. But here it's pretty quiet (except for the high-pitch voiced woman and her yapper dog that we hear below us). Actually I should amend my statement about the next-door neighbours to say that we don't hear much everyday noise from them. They seem to be on an endless DIY bender that has been carrying on since we moved in in October. Usually on the weekends, there is various drilling noise and hammering and whatnot. I was home sick from work one day though and was rudely woken up by some horrifically loud jackhammery racket coming from right on the other side of the bedroom wall. I don't know what on earth they've been doing all this time, but I swear their walls must be like swiss cheese by now. Or they have drilling skills that match O's and mine.

Besides all the construction noise, one day we suddenly started to hear them having sex loudly on the other side of the wall. At 8:30 am on a Sunday. And again at 10:30. I don't know why we didn't hear anything for the first couple of months we lived here; maybe they weren't actually around due to whatever they're doing to their house. In any case, O and I found ourselves unhappily awake and staring at the ceiling while getting to know our neighbours way too intimately. We don't even know what they look like. It started a new trend though of being woken up by them, since they seem to appreciate odd hours to make love. We've been woken up quite often early on a Sunday morning. I once had just fallen asleep on a weeknight and then they started up at around 12:30. But then this week: a quarter to 2 on a Monday morning. Gah. And O kept snoozing through the whole thing. They at least seem to have fixed their squeaky bed, which in the beginning was just comic in how cliche the sound was. The whole thing is still pretty cliche since all we usually hear is the girl making "ohohoh" sounds, which I find a bit odd. There's no other talking, no other words, no outbursts. Which I suppose I should be very thankful for. I just find it kind of weird. I've only heard the guy twice, at a much lower volume than the girl, though I'm not sure how to interpret that. I suppose it's all part of living in this too-cramped country, and I just thank God that I didn't hear anything similar from the old bag of a lady (she looked like that over-tanned woman in Something About Mary) with the 30-something boyfriend that we lived next to in the last house.