Sleeping (Or Trying To) In the City That Never Sleeps

I hate cliches a lot. One of my most hated cliches is the "city that never sleeps" idea, an idea that has been used to describe countless cities. It seems that anyone who lives in a city of over like 500,000 people feels like their city is a city that never sleeps, and while I'm pretty sure New York was the original namesake of this terrible saying, it has become so bastardized that now its fair game for anyone. However, after having lived in HK for 2 weeks, I've basically found out that this is the city that never sleeps, if there ever was one. Consequently, sleep is extremely hard to come by. After sleeping on trains in Japan for 10 days (and therefore not really sleeping well at all), I've found myself longing for that luxury, for it's much harder to sleep here than on those Japanese Shinkansens. The mattress I'm sleeping on was built for someone who's about 5'10", which, while tolerable, is not particularly comfortable. The real problem, however, is that my hallmates play sports and PS3 in the hallways until about 4:00am, very loudly. While I understand that this is just the way they act, and wouldn't ever ask them to stop because I'm the foreign one and they're just doing their thing, it makes sleeping impossible. Last night I went to bed at 11:00pm, hoping to get a good night's sleep given how tired I was. Didn't fall asleep till 1:00am or so, then was woken up at 3:30am, then 6:30am by some very loud noises from the street below outside my window. In my travels I've had to deal with this before, principally in Istanbul where my hotel room window looked out onto a busy city street, and there was a mosque right next door that had the morning call to prayer at something like 5:00am, but given the fact that that was a very short trip, I was able to cope fairly easily. This, however, has really been taking a toll on me, as I've found myself zoning out in class a lot, and just overall being tired all the time. There's also starting to be a mental factor in it all, in that I'm now expecting to not get a good night sleep, so therefore I inherently don't. Should be an interesting next few months, good thing I can't drive here, I might just fall asleep at the wheel sometime.

Class this afternoon from 2:00pm-7:00pm, should be a blast