Bad Neighbor
People get lost up here in Vallaheiði all the time; the street marquees still say the old names from when this was a military base, but the residents know the streets by different names (the new names that will, one day, get marked). And the building numbers and apartment numbers are also in a strange order, following some military logic that escapes most of us. So, occasionally Icelanders knock on my door, like this evening, and when I answer, they say an individual´s name, nothing else. From this I infer that I am naturally supposed to know the names of all my neighbors, and which apartment they are in. Unfortunately, I grew up in Southern California, where one rarely knows the names of even immediate neighbors, let alone whole blocks full. I have no idea how one acquires this sort of information, even though people I have never spoken to seem to know I´m the American at the end.
Comments
Earlier this year I voted in LA. The person ahead of me in line at the polling place gave his address as XXX apartment 502. I live at XXX apartment 503, but I'm sure I had never seen him before or since. I live in a building full of people who have the same employer, most of whom are new to the area, but the only residents with whom I have exchanged more words than it takes to navigate the laundry room were the ones at whose moving sale I bought my sofa. It took me four months to discover by accident that another lecturer in my academic unit (which comprises ca. 8 full- and part-time teaching staff) lived in the same building, one floor down, but he seemed rather taken aback when I knocked on his door, and I have not repeated the offense.
LA may be a bit extreme in this regard. In Iowa, we knew our neighbors.