Nice Neighbors

My neighbors are really quiet. The only time I even think about them is when someone new moves in and all their friends and family come over all at once. They never complain and other than having a lot of visitors during the memorial weekend they're great. I love living by the cemetery

Kirk.

We have had good neighbours in all the places that we have lived except for one couple. They were alcoholics and very abusive to each other, their adult kids and just about anyone. After our first encounter they did not bother me or mine again but they were loud and dirty. Fortunately the landlord evicted them. They also did not pay their rent.

Where we live now all of our neighbours are great. We are friendly and helpful to each other but don't live in each other's pockets. One of our neighbouring houses is owned by a very large family from Thailand. Absolutely lovely people. All ages in that family from babies to grandparents. All the adults work and just as soon as each can afford it they buy a car. They are so proud and happy and these cars are spotless and every once in a while when they are washing and polishing their cars they do mine. Right now there are 7 cars in their driveway and on the street. The really funny thing is that the stereotypical joke about Asians being bad drivers is absolutely true for all of them. At least the reversing part and forget about parallel parking. Some days watching the switching of the cars is hysterically funny. When one of the boys was going for his driver's license test he was practicing parallel parking with the entire family trying to instruct him all at once. I was laughing so hard that I made his Mom laugh uncontrollably as well and she threw an apple at me. Finally my husband walked over and just got into the passenger's seat and started teaching the boy. He passed and is the only one who can parallel park.

My theory is that the quality of drivers in the US has been going down hill for the last 30 years at least. It used to be that the bad drivers would kill themselves off by crashing their cars, a process of natural selection. The quailty of drivers was relativily high. Now we get immigrants from many countries where most people don't own even bicycles, much less cars, so they don't grow up with the rules of the road as second nature and have very little mechanical ability but we give them driver's liscenses anyway. Because there are a larger proportion of bad drivers now they take out a larger proportion of good drivers when they have accidents so the qualitity level has gone down significantly.

Back to the thread. I just moved to the country but this property has been in the family for 40 years so the neighbors do know me. So far all the neighbors are happy to see me when I visit (less than once a month) but they don't stop by my place to visit me. I have had one neighbor couple to dinner, given another some seedlings, and another a cherry tree. None have reciprocated. Maybe I will have to live here another 40 years before I am accepted completly.

I have nice neighbours here and did also at my old home. My current neighbours are helpful and don't bother me. A couple of them really keep to themselves a lot, but that's okay with me. Chris

Nimrod - actually as I mentioned the bad Asian driver is a stereotype. I have lived in Europe and spent much time in Montreal and Vancouver. Many, many Europeans and Montrealers are terrible drivers. Vancouver has a huge Asian population and they have very, very low accident rates. Except for the street racers of course. I live in a place where two cars waiting to turn left on a red light is considered a traffic jam and you can drive for hours once you leave the city and never pass another car. We have a small Asian population so they sure aren't the ones causing all the accidents. Our neighbour is head of traffic for the RCMP so we hear a lot of the stories.