Catemaco Noise

Zoning laws are a mystery in Catemaco. You may be living on a quiet residential street, and wake up one morning with a tractor repair station or a cantina as your neighbor.

Add your neighbor's rooster or his newly bought boom box blaring at 100 decibels, and you'll regret you left New York City.

Daytime noises are excruciating. There is a tourist train zipping along the Catemaco centro with full blast loudspeakers of obnoxious music. (He piped it down after I repeatedly made fun of him in my Spanish news pages).

Then there are the two local intermittent news rags who cross town in beaten up junkers peddling mostly gruesome news. The most recent aberration was their peddling "two killed" news among the tourists along the Malecon on one of the busier weekends.

Add to that any merchant who has a vehicle and a giant loudspeaker and let him loose on the streets of Catemaco peddling his wares.

The traditional noises of Catemaco are slowly disappearing like the tenor of the peanut seller, the tinkle of the knife sharpener, the whiste of the pine oil seller and many more.

For a while Catemaco was inundated with motorized tortilla sellers, whose moped beep beeps drove me nuts to the point I stored eggs on my patio to throw at them.

I don`t even want to mention the 3 cantinas within a rock throw of my current house. By now I have memorized every song on their juke boxes blaring way beyond my bed time.

The Zona Rosa of Catemaco in the last few years has begun to emulate Cancun with second story open air discos, probably hearable in Veracruz City. I bitched and bitched about them, too and apparently you can now only hear them within a 6 block range.

I don't really consider this objectionable noise, but the cacaphony of the birds along the Malecon in the early morning and late afternoon, put all the above noises to shame. And of course they shit on you when you walk below them.

I also have the pleasure of  a troop of tourist promoters congregating on my corner. On a busy weekend, their screams of "lancha, lancha" and general mayhem add to the local noise industry.

Way after midnight, the Malecon is in full swing as Catemaco's Daytona speedway, and there are dozens  of damaged post, fences, and landmarks to show their mettle. Of course there are no cops and sooner or later I expect to listen to the funereal music of death announcers also adding to the Catemaco noise mileu.

Fortunately, in the last years, the incidence of firecrackers has diminished in beautiful downtown Catemaco. For many years I was pretending to live in a war zone and diving below my desk when something sounding like a 200 mm mortar exploded in my living room.

Of course there are local inhabitants like the Fool on the Hill who still think Catemaco is a quiet little town. Of course he only has the crunch of his neighboring rock crusher to enjoy while reading this.