Tuesday, November 13, 2012

No Sirens, no Gunshots, but Church Bells

A disclaimer may be appropriate: this post depends as much on where you come from as on where you end up.

If you moved from a well manicured gated community to inner city Duisburg, Germany, the minutiae are likely different. But the overall picture will be vaild.

For us, coming from a medium-sized city to a small town, the background noise was starkly different.

We hear a siren every few weeks, usually an ambulance picking up a heart attack patient or going to the scene of an accident on the freeway not far away.

No gunshots whatsoever.

There have been some high profile, U.S. style shootings by gun nuts. There was the murder spree of some neo-Nazis but there is so little gun violence that every shooting is big news.

Crime rates are low compared to the U.S. and even compared to other European countries.

For this post, I looked at studies by the University of Konstanz, Germany, to ensure that my gut feeling was matched by reality and not the product of the kind of whishful thinking that often accompanies migrants, manifesting a need to justify uprooting the family - and the cats.

So, here we are, with the church bells being the most prominent background noise of our life.
As a side note, the bells are no longer rung by humans but are electric and on a timer, which reduces their sound level at night.

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