It’s been almost three weeks since we moved into our new place. Life has been great. I am sleeping so much better. I am getting to cook and bake my heart out. We have the privacy, peace, and quiet we had been missing. All is well on the new home front.
And then……….
I don’t know if it’s me and the somewhat black cloud of “Hey I like to fuck with you!” that follows me but I can not seem to stay happy and content for more than two weeks at a time. I know life is a roller coaster but come on. Can a girl get a break…. or at the minimum, a one month break. Is that too much to ask?
So last Friday I am in the kitchen making dinner when all of a sudden I hear this LOUD banging noise. I notice it’s coming from the neighbor next door. Now I have this awesome kitchen that has huge sliding glass doors that when you open them step out into a balcony that is enclosed by huge panes of textured glass. It is great because it allows maximum sun to spill into my kitchen while allowing me privacy. So I step out and peer out the window and I see my neighbor kneeling down on the floor with a cleaver in his hand hacking away at what appears to be a tubular piece of meat. If I was a cartoon character I would have had a giant cloud above my head filled with question marks????? Why does one need to hack away at meat on the floor? Have you no cutting board? Finally the noise stops but then a few minutes later it starts up again. I take another look (yes, I have become so European that any little noise makes me peer out my window, ok!) and once again he is kneeling on the floor but this time he has a hack saw and he is sawing away vigorously at what looks like ribs. As my friend put it to me, “Unless you are a contestant on Iron Chef and in a hurry to cut some meat, why do you need to do it on the floor and with so much intensity?) I call out to my husband to come have a gander and we then look at each other and say, “What the fuck?” which is then followed by a good five minutes of sarcastic banter back and forth. Finally, the noise subsides.
Saturday night, and I mean night. As in dark. As in no lights- he is out on the balcony cleaning his sliding glass doors. Why at night? Do you have something to hide?
Sunday morning around 8AM I am awoken to this awful sounding howl. It startles me so much I almost fall right out of bed. J says to me, “What the hell is that?” I said, “I have no idea, maybe a cat in heat?” It happens again, and then he says, “No baby, that is no cat. That is the sound of a chicken dying.” Now I am no expert but given that the past two years I have become privy to the sounds of chickens and rabbits dying, I would have thought I would have recognized this shrill. But this animal sounded like it was being tortured. So I hop out of bed and I hear “You’re going to check it out, aren’t you? hahahah” “Hell’s yeah, I am! I want to see what those crazy bastards are up to!” I come into the kitchen and peer through the glass and see not one, not two, but three people cornering a chicken on the balcony across the way and killing it! I slam the window shut and they all turn around to look. Yes, I am slamming my window in your face to let you know you have awoken me from my wonderful sleep because of chicken murder!
Now, let me tell you this. I have no problem with the fresh kill thing. I get it. But in an apartment? Really? There is no space for this tomfoolery in an apartment! There are plenty of places one can go to get fresh meat in Portugal! It would be one thing if you lived on a farm or had a private backyard where people to not have to bare witness to this type of act. But cornering chickens on a tiny balcony in a residential apartment complex can not be legal, can it? I need to get to the bottom of this. I even told my family and they all thought it was disgusting so I know I am not overreacting here!
Here are a couple images of the crime scene. This blood stayed there for days and the chickens in this bowl for a whole day! That can not be sanitary!
You can see the drops of blood all over the floor.
These chickens lay dead in a bowl in the kitchen all day and night Sunday!
Is it too much to want to have a little peace and quiet and not hear animals being killed!!??
