There’s hardly a dull Saturday morning.

The past couple of weeks, it has been the sidewalk construction making all the ruckus. This time, a transformer across the street blew up and set a van on fire. In less than a minute, the entire van was engulfed in flames, the trees and scaffolding nearby lit up, and the smoke climbed its way up the wall of building. It was exciting… at least I thought it was.

Thankfully no one was close by when the van caught on fire.

The fire and smoke went up pretty high because the scaffolding and trees that were right next to the van caught on fire as well.

No Smoking & Cuidado sign didn’t catch on fire.

When I was China, I wrote about how noisy it was at all times of the day. Even on the Peking University campus, there was construction noise as soon as the sun peeked over the horizon. As long as there is light, people shall work. It drove me crazy, but I rationalized, “look, China is a growing country, of course there will be all this racket”. All is forgiven.

Here’s a video from my dorm room in China of what I woke up to most mornings. This video doesn’t quite capture the full intensity of the annoyance.

Now I knew before coming to New York that it’s a loud city. The city never sleeps. And why does it never sleep? Because there is noise everywhere! There’s the sound of the garbage truck rumbling by at 2 in the morning. There’s the cab driver yelling at some guy for not paying a tip. There’s the delivery truck guy honking his horn because a car from New Jersey is driving too slow. And there is construction everywhere. All the time.I feel like I’m back in China with all this bleeping noise.

Here’s a video I took this morning. It’s Saturday. This is right outside my bedroom window. fml.