Noisy, Noisy Nights

We live in a great location, with convenient access to the university, a five minute walk from the Royal Mile, and quite close to excellent High Street shopping over on Princes Street.  There's lots of little pubs and coffee shops along the street, and we can walk to the farmer's market on Saturdays and see a beautiful view of the castle.  Not bad for school accommodation.  In fact, its really a great place to live, except for one small problem: noise.

One of the main contributors to our noise problem is construction.  A hotel has been in the works next door since before we moved in, and this causes issues every day.  They work from 7am to about 4pm, 7 days a week.  The skip comes at 6:30am, so thats when most of us in the building wake up, at least temporarily.  At night they string up tarps to shield materials from the rain, but with the strong winds these tarps often sound like its pouring rain out.

More construction has started at the bus stop across the street.  For those of you following our music story, this is the same bus stop where the band plays around midnight on random evenings.  Luckily, the awful music has come to and end, at least for the moment.  The problem with this latest construction site is that they've dug up part of the road and lay boards across it at night.  Because the street is one of the major routes from the Royal Mile to the south of the city, there's traffic all night long rolling over these boards making so much noise!  

Being close to the university does have its downfall.  The student union runs a number of pubs and dance clubs, many of which are just across the square.  This means almost every night we get a long wave of drunken students heading home at 3am when the clubs close.  Yawn.

There are ways to make it better.  According to our British neighbours, if the windows had double-glazing, it'd be much quieter.  Derek has plans for a removable wooden shield in the window.  If we stayed up until 3:30am every night, the clubbers should have all gone home and we'd have about 3 and a 1/2 hours of quiet.  Or we could make what we did last night permanent: set up our mattress in the living room, which faces out into the courtyard at the back of the place.  We'll keep you posted!