Double Bang

I was hoping to finish up trading early Friday but in the end although it was a profitable day we had to follow positions into the London close, which meant another half-past midnight finish. After finishing up some paperwork and flicking through the banality that appears to be late-night Korean TV, finally fell asleep around 01:45. At 04:45 our neighbour - she of the now regularly slamming doors who we still haven't seen - made it back home and the click-click-click of her high-heels down the apartment corridor was enough to bring me to the verge of consciousness. She didn't take the chance that this was enough though, and slammed the door with the kind of force usually reserved for the hatch of submarines which are doing an emergency dive.

As the thundering sound of the door echoed away around the building, I became aware that she appeared to have a female friend with her today, and sure enough, there followed the sound of talking next door and generally banging around before the friend decided to leave with almost as much noise as her arrival. Sometime during the stopover period someone else in the building came home and I heard another big bang from another floor. I don't know what type of people live here but I'm beginning to feel like I've moved into a whorehouse, albeit an otherwise discrete one.

Now I was desperately trying to get back to sleep when neighbour's friend left, but I could have sworn they said 'bye' to each other when they parted. I know I have a habit of starting to hear everything in English when I get really tired but this woke me up, and I spent the next fifteen minutes raging at the idea that my constantly interrupted sleep was being caused by a fellow foreigner. I don't know why that should matter more than if it were a Korean - perhaps because I think a Korean is marginally entitled to be an insensitive arsehole in their own country, and maybe because if they're a foreigner - and assuming they speak English - I might be able to teach them some British swearwords when I convey my thoughts on their attempts to wake everyone else up at night.