Music in Asia...

can be a pretty hilarious thing, if you are the kind of person I am, who hears background music and is easily fascinated by her surroundings. (I'm told some people don't hear music in the background, so I make this distinction.)

Let's begin in Taiwan, where daily, for over a year, I heard the high pitched sound of the trash truck going throughout all the neighborhoods playing "Fur Elise" by Beethoven. Seriously, every day this tinty tune would play through loud and bad speakers while driving up and down every lane alerting the locals that they could come running out of their homes with their garbage and join the throngs of others tossing their bags into the back of the stinky truck. When I first arrived, I was amused and fascinated by this, but by the end of the third month, when I was sick at home in bed for about 3 days, I grew very annoyed with a sound ringing through the public airwaves that could not be turned off or ignored from my 5th floor apartment. After many more months, I grew better at ignoring it, but honestly, I don't believe I could ever sit through a serious performance of Beethoven's love song For Elise (whoever she was).

Imagine the scene when I arrived in Thailand, and within a few days made a dentist appointment for cleaning and check up. They wanted to do x-rays, and we all know that drill - sit in a chair, place a hard piece of board in your mouth, hold your head just so, while wearing a metal vest, don't move...technician leaves the room for a few seconds and voila, x-ray done. Well, I was sitting there, prepped and ready to go, and as the technician was leaving the room she said, "Don't move for 10 seconds" and the x-ray machine began it's rotation around my face. Ever so faintly, I heard a very high pitched tune, distant, but strangely nearby...you guessed it, "Fur Elise"...playing from the X-RAY MACHINE, and me supposed to sit STILL!! Toughest 10 seconds I'd seen in awhile!

The other day, here in Thailand, I was walking out of the hair washing place ($3.00 wash and style, gotta love it), and had already heard the marching band from the school across the street practicing, so I paused to listen for a moment. They were pretty good, and had a pretty full sound. A huge smile came over my face when I recognized the tune, shook my head in fascination and disbelief, and marveled at the widespread success of ABBA, when a high school band in the middle of Thailand is playing with great skill, "Mamma Mia".

Now, it's Thursday morning, and I'm just waking up with some coffee, sitting on the floor at Kris and Jen's and listening to the birds and insects, while occasionally hearing the dull sound of a machine turning on and off, or a car/bus/scooter driving on the busy road fifty yards away. It's not uncommon in Asia to hear these speaker trucks driving around making some announcement deemed important by their owners/sponsors, and I usually tune it out, 'cause it's in the native language. However, just a few moments ago, I heard a tune, and thought the words were in English, so I listened closely. Bizarrely, randomly, they were playing a song from 1988 by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, "I wanna walk but I run back to you, that's why I hate myself for loving you! I hate myself for loving you..." Wow! It just never gets old...not the song, but the fascination with how songs reach places like this, and come to be played publicly. Why this song, why this place, why this time? Always funny, though.

Have a great day.

Until next time,
LC from TH