Rear Window

So today's blog is about voyeurism in its many entertaining forms. 

The first day I arrived at our apartment and stood on the balcony, I immediately thought of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rear Window.  If you haven't seen it and you like suspense, I highly recommend it.  In it, Jimmy Stewart is bedridden and entertains himself by watching all his neighbors in the complex across the street.  Soon the good, the bad, and the ugly surface and you've got yourself an exciting plot line. 

We don't have anything like that to report quite yet, just a lot of older women hanging out their laundry.  But you can see the similarity - this is the view out my window right now.  Who knows what I could see if I watched long enough?  Of course my eyes would be on that red window to the right.  But we have other methods...

Last night, we discovered that although our mostly broken t.v. only gets two broadcasting stations, it also somehow gets the security camera channel and so we can watch people coming in and out of our building, coming up the elevator, walking down the hall, etc.  You can see Beth and Angie's excitement as we made the realization.  And to top it off...

I was working in my room this evening when Beth came in and asked if I had a second.  I said "Sure!" and followed her out onto the balcony.  There is a lot to look at from our balcony, and so it took me a minute to realize what she was getting at.  "Smell anything?" she asked.  "No" I said.  She had me go inside and come back out again and then I did.  Unmistakeable - someone was rockin' the ganj somewhere very nearby.  We spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out where it was coming from and theorizing about which of our neighbors it could be, but in the end we had to give up and go back to our work.  So now we have all kinds of leads to follow up on and perhaps if we ever finish with our lesson planning we can solve some kind of exciting crime. 

But in the meantime I think I'll just go out to relax on the balcony for a minute.  ;)