Our cheery neighbourhood

Think United Nations and throw in handfuls of babies bawling in the background, and you'd pretty much have a mental picture of our neighbourhood.

Our little apartment is getting a little cramped, with baby items peeking out of every cranny. But we'd be loath to move for a couple of reasons. First, life is always boring if everything around you is cookie-cutter similar. Well, we can't complain as to the international flavour of our neighbours. For some reason, we seem to have crammed in representatives of a dozen or more lands into our small 300-family condo community. We've folks from Eastern Europe and Western Europe, Indians, Malaysians and Singaporeans, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans and so on. Not that we're necessarily in and out of each other's homes, and the urban tendency to avert one's eyes is alive and well too. But for all that, it's a cheery microcosm of the increasingly 'globalised' world: Some handy early exposure for Sonny.

Then there are the babies. Every household on our floor has had an addition to the family in the last year (no exaggeration here). There are young children scampering out of every doorway and splashing into the pool. In the mornings, mothers cradling babies jostle for space in the common spaces downstairs, so there's always someone's baby to tickle, mothering tips to be exchanged and sly comments to be whispered. Sonny will not want for playmates, and we parents will form a pooled resource for help and reassurance when things get hairy.

Could we want for more, as neighbourhoods go? Inevitably, there are black sheep about. Someone dumped glue out their window perhaps two years ago, some of which ended up disfiguring the pane in our back bedroom - and which we can't get at to clean off. We did have a problem of neighbours leaving bulky items out on the shared lift landing (as blogged about in 'Too much, these cluttersome neighbours'), but a circular was sent round by the condo management and the offending family suddenly moved, so that problem is now in the past.

Overall, if this were a grade school class, we'd give our little community a 'B+', with 'A' within grasp. Anyone else living in especially interesting communities?