Who to Call about Loud Noises in Neighborhood

Double-glazed windows are one of the key items that shows how Taiwanese people clearly value other things in life to me - and one of my bugbears for about 20 years.

As far as I can see it, double-glazing has two functions:

  1. Heat insulation, meaning my AC doesn’t have to work as hard in the summer, and hopefully in the winter I won’t be entirely freezing my nuts off indoors.
  2. Sound insulation, meaning I don’t have to listen to the selfish & ignorant bastard du jour who doesn’t give a shit about his neighbors.

Neither of these two benefits seems to be anywhere near the top of the average Taiwanese person’s list of “things I need in life” - so much so that double-glazing is so vanishingly rare in Taiwan that I don’t even remember ever seeing it. I heard of it ONCE - and the person who’d installed it was a foreigner for his uncaring landlord.

Oh my…

There’s a psycho dog down the road from me who makes a jolly fine racket on occasions. When I asked my landlord why the closer neighbors don’t do anything about it she said actually they all had double glazing installed just because of this one dog. But no one would actually confront the dog owner. I’ve given up working from home recently simply because the racket from dogs barking during the day is too distracting. And while I’ll confront individual dog owners you simply can’t take them all on. My theory is Taiwanese like barking dogs because it makes them feel safer. They’ll on occasions return dogs to the pet shop on account of they don’t bark enough.

LOL safer from what, cats? :joy:

People are officially nuts.

So, I have a theory no. 2 I’m working on. Chinese (I’m extending the scope) have an almost genetic memory passed down by previous generations who suffered at the hands of invading parties (indigenous, Mongolians, Hakka if you’re Punti, Punti if you’re Hakka, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Portugese, Russians, the NZ 1982 world cup team etc.). This explains the obsession with putting grills and bars on windows (on the 17th floor no less) and broken glass on top of concrete walls. People are terrified of outside intruders even though home invasion and burglary is almost unheard of here.

Seriously? Taiwan is swarming with burglars, and the cat burglars are famous for their Spiderman-like powers…

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Yeah I suspect they suffered at the hands of the Chinese more :slight_smile:

And it will never end, if Icon’s brood keeps growing…

Wait, “cat burglars”, they come to your house and steal your cats, right??

No…the cats are the burglars. They’re basically raccoons, but without the masks.

You BASTARD!

My friends office on the 15th floor was broken into through a small bathroom window that the thief would have had to have jumped over or down to. Home burglary is extremely common here, made slightly less common by many accessible windows having bars on them.

Well, Chinese people do love building walls around anything and everything possible. There’s a border wall joke in there somewhere…

I’ve heard on here that Taiwan is full of petty thieves but I’ve only ever heard of it happening once personally in five years here. From what I gather, the south is notorious for vehicle theft.

25 years, one burglary. You do the math. Mind you I own literally nothing of value so maybe the bastards are breaking in and leaving empty handed.

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Que pasó, que pasó, vamos ahí! :smile_cat:

Get some bars on your windows.

And I though bars on high floors windows were to avoid kids to fall…:eek:

¡Oh, no, aquí vienen! :runaway:

That’s what the nets are for.

I used to think a possibly good method to sell double pane glass windows would be to place a constantly barking dog in a neighborhood for a week and at the same time put window pane advertising in nearby mailboxes.