You can't always choose your neighbors, although they are often the people closest to you in terms of space. Depending on where you live, you might have to deal in this respect with the most diverse types. Lucky are those who get along well with their neighbors or even never get to see them. Often enough you hear about the stress some of us have with the people next door and also about solid and violent arguments.
Since you can't look into the minds of most people, every time you move, you may regret it after the first neighborly meeting. If you had only known beforehand who lives next door!
But even if you don't move yourself, it can happen that someone you'd rather avoid suddenly moves next door to you. Sometimes you just have to put a good face on the matter, and other times you luckily manage to avoid it. Which unfortunately is sometimes not easy at all.
As I just got to hear, a restaurant in our neighborhood had closed recently, and instead of it there is now a pub. And in the mornings the neighbors around this pub are now constantly treated to the glorious and smelly aftermath of too much Japanese firewater. Yes, the Japanese man is quite similar to the European man in this respect and they eagerly imitate each other.
And I heard about another neigbour family who seems to have a rather short fuse and who freak out loudly at every little thing. Not only towards outsiders, but also within their own family, so there seems to be quite some action.
There are just too many people living near us who have a quirk and who are simply psychopaths. If possible, you want to have exactly these people far away from you.
I'm actually quite happy that it's rather too quiet in my immediate neighborhood and we rarely get to see the neighbors to the left, right and across the street. If we see each other, we just greets and sometimes exchanges a few friendly words. For me, that's usually enough, since I have enough to do elsewhere. In recent years I do enjoy the fact that I can easily avoid most people, and that they also like to leave me alone.
I can get along quite well with this unspoken agreement, at least at the place where I live at the moment. Probably this will change in the not too distant future, and then I will have to take a closer look at my potential neighbors again. Maybe it would be better to move to the forest or open countryside right away, with the nearest neighbor a few hundred meters away. This would avoid some conflict potential from the beginning...
