Parrots = Seagulls

Yes, that's right. We have parrots that alight upon the drain pipe of the apartment building next door eveyr morning around 5am. They are very punctual. And they sound like seagulls. Big green, exotic parrots that screech and scream to the limit of their small bird-lungs and sound surprisingly like the seagulls that I dislike so much at the Jersey shore. Only their beautiful. Today for the first time, I half-opened my bleary, sleep-deprived eyes (it's too hot to sleep with the windows shut, but there are too many mosquitos to sleep with them open...) and knelt up on my bed. I tugged back my curtain and looked up, to where Justine had told me the stupid birds had been hanging out, allowing their screeching to be amplified a bazillion times as it ricochets off the two apartment building walls. I expected to see crows, ugly brown birds, or even the yiguirros, the national bird that calls the rain...but instead I see these green balls of feathers perched on the pipe.

Sometime between when I hurl myself into the shower and finish eating my breakfast the parrots leave; you can hear them, still screaming, as they fly off. They only sit outside our windows in these early morning hours. They don't have a nest there, as far as we can tell. I am beginning to think that they just sit by our building to ensure that I am always up before my alarm...a much louder version of the neighbor who leaves his alarm set for 5am even when he's away for the weekend.