The nights are stinking hot and humid.  Buenos Aires is about as tropical as Auckland - i.e. technically not very tropical actually, but with the heat of January it certainly feels tropical.  It's a soggy heat that promotes extreme lethargy and a rather short temper...

So the night that a car alarm went off on the street when we were just sat down to watch the telly, I was about ready to strangle somebody.  It's not that it was a particularly loud alarm, it wasn't even one of the alarms that cycles through an increasingly irritating set of distinct warbles wauwauwauwau dooooh! dooooh! dooooh! dooooh! meh! meh! meh! meh! wee woo wee woo wee woo wee woo!! ...over and over again (actually, those car alarms are a little less common in Buenos Aires, I think because ambulances here use the same cycle of warbles for a siren).  No, this alarm was a slightly muffled sounding creeek creeek noise, like a sick cricket chirping into a megaphone, extremely repetetively, but after the first half hour, slightly irregularly, as if the battery was starting to go flat.

The most irritating thing was that it had gone off the night before too, and had gone on for hours.  When I went out on to the balcony to see if I could pinpoint the culprit car, the balconies of the building in front were filling with neighbours in a similar state of irritated curiosity, peering down into the street in their nighties or boxers.  None of us were in the mood for a neighbourly "hola" between balconies.  One guy stormed back inside slamming the balcony door behind him, as if he were on his way to sort the bloody thing out with a baseball bat (in NZ this would be a cricket bat, but cricket doesn't exist in Argentina, and when you try to describe it, they think you're talking about croquet), but I waited to see if he would appear on the street, and he didn't.

So it being the second roasting night in a row that the chirruping alarm started up, and knowing that we were in for several hours of this chinese water-torture before it would give up, my blood already had a low boiling point.  I did angry peering from the living-room balcony again, but given that I couldn't even identify which car it was because of the echoes between buildings, it wasn't very satisfying.

I said to Ceci that I was going to go down "to investigate", which for the aggressive part of me actually meant "to strangulate".  The aggressive part of me is, probably fortunately, miniscule compared to the lazy-cowardly-rational part of me, for which I was going find out which car (or possibly shop) alarm it was, so I could have a more narrow focus for my silent-pacifist ire.  So I stormed down to the ground floor (technically, you can't 'storm' in a lift, because you have to stand still, but I made up for this by imagining violent acts against automobiles with a stormy expression on my face, to appease my diminutive inner Mr Hyde).

When I got out on the street, and stormed along the line of parked cars across the road,  I discovered that none of them was the source of the irritating noise. In fact, from there it sounded like the alarm was coming from our side of the street.  But when I crossed back, it wasn't there either - it sounded like it was coming from a first-floor balcony (specifically, the balcony of the man with the hypothetical baseball bat).  Crossing again, it clearly wasn't there but rather floating somewhere between the first and second floor of our building.

With the frustrating feeling of finding myself in some bizarre auditory labyrinth, and the faint suspicion of being the victim of a hidden-camera TV show (called something like "Let's all laugh at the stupid foreigner"), I decided to re-group in the apartment.  Trying to be as cool-headed as possible, from the bedroom balcony I spied downwards, doing my best to tune together the twin gifts from millennia of hunter-gatherer evolution: binocular vision and stereo hearing.

After probably a little too long to do justice to all that time evolving, I found that the irritating muffled car alarm noise was emanating from the abundant jungle of potplants on the balcony two floors below ours.  I reasoned that it must in fact be a sick cricket chirping into a megaphone.  Squinting into the half-light, I couldn't make out any megaphone-shaped shadows amongst the twigs and fronds, however.

...the only possible conclusion being that the solitary urban crickets here are really big and loud - probably, like the weta on display in Te Papa, bigger than a mouse!