Noises Overhead in Singapore - Why?

Problem
What's that noise overhead?

Answers
I've learned to identify a lot of noises.

America
Noisy footsteps overhead. Sounds like elephants stomping up and down. The block where I lived in Rockville Maryland in the nineteen eighties was a three storey wooden construction. Every time anybody walked overhead, you heard every step. The people who lived in the middle of the architectural sandwich, on floor two (the English would say around and then first) was at loggerheads with both the people below and the people above.

Sinapore
In Singapore we hear:
the traffic,
the children shouting in the swimming pool
and the children's playground,
people shouting in the corridor,
the noise of
machines blowing the anti mosquito fogging.
During the evening we hear the ball going backing wards and forwards in tennis matches.

At bedtime we hear the crickets. The noise rises to a crescendo, stops, then starts again.

We get noise at bedtime. The building gradually goes silent. Often we are woken at night by thunderstorms. Sometimes we are woken by noise overhead. More usually we are woken by a storm, get up early, then hear the people overhead also up early.

In Singapore the second apartment we rented, in a block called The Beaumont, we rented the top floor so that there would be no overhead noise.

Now we are in a very solid block, yet we hear noise overhead. The noise starts at 5 am.

Why so early? Are they on shift work?

I came up in the lift with a couple who lived on the floor below mine. I told them, "I'd like to meet the people above me. I want to ask why they get up at five am?"

The woman replied, "It is often because they want to get children ready for school. It takes time to wash them and dress them and give them breakfast. Then you want to drive them to school before the rush hour starts."

Now I know. Now you know.

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Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.