an Egyptian trait

This is well-known, and I think I already mentioned it here on the former incarnation of the blog…

Not all Egyptians are noisy (though a high percentage are). However, it seems that all Egyptians do have a high noise tolerance, whether or not they are creating the noise themselves.

Construction is now underway next door and continues throughout the night. I’ve had to make major adjustments to sleeping location in order to deal with it, and I’m not an especially light sleeper. But my hundreds of Egyptian neighbors don’t seem bothered by it in the least, or at least the ones I’ve asked don’t seem to notice it.

Incidentally, it seems to be a specifically Egyptian trait, not an Arab one more generally… My Jordanian friends have been laughing about the noise levels in Egypt for years. (And Jordanians do tend to be fairly quiet, I’ve noticed, insofar as one can generalize.)