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[side_show]

I've deeply enjoyed meeting the neighbours since moving in.  After two years of our old neighbours hating us because the house we were renting was the eye-sore of the block, it's nice to move up in the world and be greeted so warmly.  Most people are very curious about us since we built a brand-new house in such and old, non-affluent neighbourhood.  (for those of you who aren't up to speed, my SO and I are poorer than most of our neighbours and got a lot of help from the government to get where we are.)

I had a little girl shout at me from the back lane, "are you guys rich?"  "I like your cat."

I was sitting on the porch today editing my play, when two young girls walked by loudly conversing as to why one of them had stopped doing drugs to show up some other girl that both of them obviously hated.

And my next door neighbour is this very friendly old Thai lady whose name I still can't pronounce, but I feel like it would be so rude to ask her how to say it a third time. She told me today "You have such an nice house.  It big.  In two years, you have baby."  (I react in horror) "Baby fun!  Baby lots of work, but baby fun!"  I loved how she was so specific and certain.  Two years eh?  Sadly it's not part of the plan, but I know where I can find a baby sitter should I need one.

So yesterday I went on a long walk, and I found myself in the most incredible Italian specialty grocery, which takes up almost an entire block. Deluca's wine shop, Deluca's bakery, Deluca's grocery and Deluca's restaurant each with their own store front and all connected through little archways to each other. It wasn't like a huge faceless chain though, each shop had little tucked away nooks and crannies.  They had so many things that I had never seen or imagined - goat cheese shaped to look like mushrooms labelled champini, in some sort of whey, banana nectar, an entire isle of oils and vinagars, and jars and jars of their own store made stuff too, hand labelled jars of anchovies.  As I left the store, I noticed that out of the block there was only one store in the middle, that wasn't part of the Deluca's family, a closed down travel agent, and I kid you not, as I left the grocery, an older guy in a butcher's apron came out at the same time carrying a ladder to a younger guy waiting with a bucket of paint and some brushes.  They were painting over the sign, and clearly other employees were inside the old travel agent, trying to figure out exactly where to punch a hole in each wall to complete the connection between wine store and bakery.  In the window, someone had playfully leaned a few sign letters they had found somewhere: "A-R-T" in big red block letters.  

So since I'm just now becoming part of a neighbourhood for the first time as a grown woman, tell me this, who are the people in your neighbourhood?  What makes yours a good neighbourhood? What makes a good neighbour?

[Doc]

Damn, that sounds like maybe the best neighbourhood in the world.
Also bonus points for teenage bitchiness helping kids beat drugs.

My relationship with my neighbours has for years been characterised by an awkward sense of social obligation and increased alienation.
I still live with my folks and when we first started living here basically every house had a family with young kids in it but I guess as all the kids grew older we just stopped hanging out together and people move away and the cool old  people across the road die etc etc.
I still see young kids running around up and down the street and think it's cool that they're still keeping the whole community thing going but it's kind of a bummer becuase it isn't part of who I am anymore: my idea of where my 'community' or whatever it is has shifted but damn I would sure like to live in a neighbourhood like that.

[V-Adore]

I don't know if this counts, since I live in a dorm, but next year I'm going to live in the best dorm ever. I'm in a two-person suite, so my suitemate and I have a giant common room pretty much all to ourselves, but just about everyone I know is in the same building. They're an eclectic group; it's very much the "work hard, play hard" style, so you have this aura of intense academic concentration all the time. It sounds stressful, but somehow it's very constructive.

[andalucia]

This summer I moved out to a suburb of Montreal, which I love beyond all reason.  It's pretty family-ish, not much of a nightlife or anything, but it makes up for that silly stuff in many ways.  

1.  Awesome groceries.  The supermarkets are kind of crappy, but there are little Chinese, African, and Middle Eastern food stores everywhere that are cheap and awesome.  

2.  An incongruous cult video rental place walking distance from home.

3.  Neighbours:  The other day I was walking down the street in a Batman t-shirt, and a child yelled to its mother, "Regarde!  C'est Batman, cette-dame là!" ("Look, that lady there is Batman!")  Yes!  I am!

4.  Because Montreal is not all that big, even waaay out in the suburbs where I am, is still a 15-minute metro ride away from school.

Hooray!

[Carlos del Vaca]

I like our neighborhood pretty well.  The most notable thing of late is the 4th of July celebration put on by our neighbors across the street.  According to reports they spent twelve hundred dollars on fireworks this year.  It's pretty far from Virginia to Mexico, but it looked like they made the trip, maybe more than once.  And they must have friends in the fire department, because no firemen or cops came around to shut them down.  Cuz this shit was NOT LEGAL for use by private citizens.



It sure was fun to watch, though, and we didn't have to content with crowds of idiots afterwards like we would for the fireworks show on the Mall.  Scared the living crap out of my little girl though.

[CortJstr]

Dang. Most people are just content to shoot up to Phantom Fireworks in Breezewood. Going to Mexico requires dedication to your craft.

My neighbors . . . um exist. Yup, I have definitely seen people going in and out of the appartmens near mine.

[slink]

I have neighbours. Ones a nosey (but pleasant) old woman, the mother of the ex-farmer and his family who live in the big house. They're fairly pleasant too.
And next door we have a retired couple (one a teacher, one who worked for the MOD as a coder and is ordaned), who are fairly, erm... pleasant.

Not a lot of neighbours but, I mean when in doubt they're around and helpful which is good. I like the whole not having a lot of neighbours thing.

When I lived in a city, we lived upstairs from this crazy old man who was always calling the police on us for walking through our living room or some such. He was obsessed with the idea we were out to make his life hell by being noisy. One day it rained so torrentially that the backyards flooded, and my flatmate watched him shovelling water through the fence between our yards. It was like Piglet fruitlessly shovelling water during the flood. What I'd give for a video of that!

[Bozack]

At home, our neighbors consist mostly of awesome old people and really, really crappy yuppies, with their crappy yuppie kids driving their crappy yuppie SUV's into my friends cars. FUCK. I HATE them.
In the new apartment, I have only seen the neighbors walking around or from their doors. There's a very well-kempt Chinese man upstairs, and almost every door to an apartment has some sort of religious icon; a lot of Mexicali Jesus stickers, but some cool Ganesh stuff too. It has to be better than our first apartment in New York, the famous 235 W. 103rd, where the neighbors were crack dealers. Thus it was really quiet, really safe and we were basically guaranteed that we would not get robbed, but there were always crackheads waiting to get in downstairs.

[AlohaDawg]

Our old neighborhood in Hawaii had more kids in it and the ice cream truck used to come around. It was more fun for my daughter. There are only two little boys within safe walking distance of our cul-de-sac now.

The families are nice. Our immediate next door neighbor is "Uncle Phil" to Rebecca and she goes over there and pets his dog. One thing about Hawaii in general (at least, where we have lived) is that if my 6 year old wanders outside and goes someplace by herself I'm not immediately freaked out by worst-case scenarios. I'll just look around and she'll be next door on her scooter or petting Phil's dog or whatever. To me, that sense of it being a relatively safe place for kids makes it a good neighborhood.

We live in a subdivision on a bluff above the part of town where the stores are so we can't walk to them. When we lived in Evanston, we could walk to the stores, to the movies, to almost anything in town, and it was a short train ride to downtown Chicago. Although it wasn't 'safe' in the same sense as where we are now, the number of parks and stores and things to do made that a good place too. The weather was rough compared to here, though. I wish I could have a combination of Evanston and Kailua. That would be an incredible place to live.

[wombat]

There's a house across the street where a nice normal seeming older lady who I almost never saw used to to live apparently by herself.  A few years ago, it came to be much more obviously inhabited by a guy who was like the stereotypical slightly deranged leftover Vietnam vet in a movie.  He seemed to be home at all hours and drank a lot.  There was no evidence of how he supported himself to own a big house in this not cheap neighborhood.  Things got weirder when he decided to start decorating his house for Halloween with a skeleton hanging by its neck from the roof of the house, which he left up for nearly two months.

I never saw the woman anymore and I had pretty much convinced myself he'd murdered her and buried her in the basement and took the house.  (I didn't really think he was using her skeleton for the Halloween decoration because I assume it takes a lot of skill to produce a skeleton for that purpose.)   I thought this for several years.  

Then a few months ago, I saw the old lady getting out of a car across the street with some bags of groceries.  

I guess it's not so much the neighbors as my overactive imagination.

[side_show]

I hear you AD.  When we chose our lot I remember we were standing there and a herd of kids ran past, apparently playing "big kids against little kids tag," and saying to the SO - "people let their kids run around loose, that's a good sign.  These kids also seem to assume that our back yard is their playground - that's a not so good thing."  My writing grant should pay nicely for a fence to correct the latter issue.  I don't assume the kids are bad, I just know they're bored and unsupervised, which oft equals bad behavior.

Across the street is "The guy with the dogs."  He has at least five dogs.  My friendly neighbour with the name I don't know, bought a puppy from him a month ago, so I imagine he used to have more thand five.  He walks three together and the other two separatly.  He also seems to have some sort of relationship with a dog that seems to just run loose (perhaps this is dog # 6, and I've also noticed that the neighbourhood stray cats seem to hover around his yard.  I have a feeling he's feeding the strays.

Also, Asherdan, in regard to The Lazy Bum Element, my SO and I totaly fit the MO, we're 20 somethings, our yard is just expose clay at the moment ( even thought the builders told us we had to go unlandscaped for a year to allow for settling, we both still feel like bums with a dirt yard) and for the first month of living here we couldn't afford to buy a garbage can.  We're not poor right now, we're po'.  We don't have dumpsters in our neighbourhood, only private cans, but I would never leave my giraffe-bone laden bag on the ground - that would be stupid and mean to whoever cared enough to clean up after someone that idiotic.  For the first month of our lives in this house, I have been sneaking garbage into our neighbours' cans, hoping they don't hate us.  A couple weeks ago I got a neighbour's permission to use her can.  Last night I proudly painted our address in three places on my first ever, grown up garbage can, donated to me by my parents, tyed the lid to the handle with twine, and wheeled it out into the back lane for pick up.  Hooray for simple pleasures.  

In regard to lay-abouts in my neck of the woods, our across the lane neighbour is a gent in his mid 40's with a big-ol' beer belly, and a long scraggley fall of hair around the back and sides where he isn't balding.  He has three cars in his back yard (which takes up all of his yard), each have clearly been sitting for a long time un-driven, each with hoods/doors/bumpers a different colour from the body, and all with a painted letter on each windshield (what's with the painted letter, anyone?).  He recently used old warped, weather worn plywood to build a make-shift shed for himself, and I have to say it goes well with the parked junkers.

Also, we got a neighbourhood info sheet dropped in our box which lists helpful numbers along with "police morals unit" and the "report a john line"  ...interesting.

[AugustWest]

I don't have a neighborhood.

[Doc]

I'm thinking Police Morals Unit is like an older and grouchier version of the dude that lives next to me that runs the neighbourhood watch or a group of old ladies who sit around drinking tea and talking about how the neighbourhood is going to hell and then, depending on where you live, organises a cross burning or gay bashing.

[AugustWest]

Are you kidding me?  The Police Morals Unit?  

It's the VICE SQUAD, People!  It's Lt. Scanlon!  Hello!


Did nobody else watch Barney Miller but me?

[side_show]

Turns out the police morals unit is specially dedicated to chasing away prostitues and the like, and also takes reports of sex crimes, child porn etc.  So the "report a john" line is for ratting out the johns, the "morals line" is for ratting out the hookers, pimps, and pornographers.

We've seen some ladies of the the night - not in our neighbourhood, but on the main strip that runs from the downtown to suburbia.  They were quite a few blocks from our house, but close enough that  I can understand why the phone number is there.   You have to pass through the hooker grotto to get to my neighbourhood, so you can't miss the hookers.  I was truly shocked at how they totally shook it for passers by.  I mean, I've seen plenty of hookers in my day (I used to work in the worst part of town), but usually the deflated bored kind that basically look like they're waiting for the bus, only there's no bus stop and she's somehow stretched a tube top into some sort of make shift mini-dress.  But these girls were really putting it out there, really stressing the fact that they will have sex with you in a really clear way, dancing, bending over and jiggling, etc.  And these were all details I gleaned from stopping at a red light, so, good up on them for putting out such a clear marketing message, I guess.