Daniel sent us this one — he's lived in Jerusalem apartments for a decade, more of them than he'd like thanks to the rental circus here, and he's had it with the noise. He's hearing neighbors' music through the walls right now, he's had apartments where you could hear someone cough with crystal clarity, and the honking outside is relentless. The landlord installed double-glazed windows that don't actually do much. His wife's an architect, they're dreaming of building properly one day — acoustic windows that actually work, real sound isolation between units, and the ability to crank studio monitors without becoming the neighbor everyone hates. His core question is, what's the failure mode here? Why is noise insulation done so badly, especially in Israel, and how do you actually do it right?
This is such a good prompt. I've been thinking about this ever since I read it because it touches something that drives me absolutely nuts about Israeli construction. I practiced pediatrics here for years, and the number of families I'd see where the kids couldn't sleep because of neighbor noise, or parents were chronically exhausted from thin-wall living — it's a genuine public health issue hiding in plain sight. By the way, today's script is coming to us from DeepSeek V four Pro.
New voice in the room. Hope it appreciates a good rant about construction standards.
I think we're about to find out. So let's start with the physics. Sound transmission between spaces happens through two completely different mechanisms, and most bad construction conflates them or ignores one entirely. The first is airborne sound — your neighbor's music, conversation, television. Sound waves hit a wall, make it vibrate, and that vibration radiates into your space. The second is impact sound — footsteps, things dropping, furniture moving. That's vibration transmitted directly through the structure.
I'm guessing the fix for one doesn't necessarily fix the other.
You can have a wall that blocks airborne sound beautifully but transmits footstep noise like a drum. The metric for airborne sound is S.— Sound Transmission Class. Higher is better. A standard interior wall with drywall on both sides and no insulation is around S.thirty to thirty-four. At that level, you can understand normal speech through the wall.
Which explains the cough-hearing situation Daniel described.
thirty, loud speech is audible and understandable. forty, loud speech is audible but you can't make out the words. fifty, loud speech is barely audible. sixty, you basically can't hear anything short of someone screaming. The International Building Code recommends S.fifty for walls between dwelling units — that's the minimum for what most people would consider acceptable privacy.
What's the typical Israeli apartment wall sitting at?
This is where it gets grim. Most Israeli residential construction uses concrete block walls — "blocs" — with plaster directly applied. No cavity, no resilient channels, no acoustic insulation. A standard twenty-centimeter concrete block wall with plaster on both sides gives you maybe S.forty-five on a good day. But that's the lab rating. Real-world performance is always worse because of flanking transmission — sound finding paths around the wall through the floor, the ceiling, the structural frame.
Even the number on paper isn't the number you're actually living with.
And Israeli construction has a particular vulnerability here. Most buildings use a concrete skeleton — beams and columns — with block infill walls. The concrete frame is continuous through the building. Sound hits the block wall, vibrates the frame, and the frame carries it right around to your side. It's like trying to soundproof a room inside a bell.
That's a vivid and depressing image.
Now, let's talk about windows, because Daniel mentioned the double-glazing disappointment. Not all double glazing is created equal. of a window depends on glass thickness, the air gap between panes, and whether the panes are different thicknesses. Standard double glazing with two four-millimeter panes and a twelve-millimeter air gap — that's maybe S.twenty-eight to thirty. A single-pane window is around twenty-six. So you're getting almost no acoustic benefit from cheap double glazing. It's designed for thermal insulation, not sound.
The landlord wasn't necessarily lying — they just installed windows that do nothing for noise.
A proper acoustic window is a completely different animal. You want laminated glass — two layers of glass bonded with a plastic interlayer that dampens vibration. You want asymmetrical pane thicknesses — maybe six millimeters on one side, four on the other — so they have different resonant frequencies. You want a wide air gap, ideally a hundred millimeters or more. You want the frame acoustically sealed, with compression gaskets that don't degrade. A serious acoustic window can hit S.forty-five to fifty-five.
What's the price difference?
Roughly double to triple the cost of standard windows. But if you're building from scratch, the incremental cost of upgrading windows across a whole house is way less than retrofitting later. And the quality-of-life return is enormous. It's one of those things where spending the money upfront pays back every single day.
Let me pull us back to the wall problem, because that's really the core of Daniel's question. He's hearing music through the wall right now. What's actually failing, and what would doing it right look like?
The fundamental principle of sound isolation is mass, separation, and damping. Mass is the simplest — heavier walls block more sound. Double the mass and you gain about six decibels of reduction. But mass alone is inefficient. A solid concrete wall heavy enough to hit S.sixty would be absurdly thick and expensive. That's where separation comes in.
The ideal wall between apartments isn't one wall — it's two completely separate walls with an air gap between them. Each wall has its own studs, its own drywall, and they don't share any structural connection. Sound hits the first wall, makes it vibrate, but that vibration has to jump across the air gap to reach the second wall. Air is a terrible conductor of vibration, so most of the energy dies in the gap. This is called a double-stud wall, and it can hit S.sixty-plus without being unreasonably thick.
Why doesn't everyone do this?
Cost and floor area. A double-stud wall with a meaningful air gap adds maybe a hundred to a hundred and fifty millimeters of thickness compared to a standard wall. Over a whole building, that's square meters of saleable floor area lost. Developers don't want to give that up, and buyers don't see the value until they're living with the consequences.
In Israel specifically, the construction industry has been in a perpetual state of playing catch-up on housing supply for decades. Speed and cost per unit dominate everything.
Israel builds fast and cheap because the demand is relentless. The standard is essentially the minimum the law allows, and the law doesn't require much on acoustics. Israel has a building standard — T.one five five five — that covers acoustic requirements, but enforcement is patchy at best. There's supposed to be a minimum S.rating for party walls, but I've talked to contractors who've never had an acoustic test done on a residential project in their entire career.
Wait — there's actually a standard on the books but nobody tests against it?
Welcome to Israeli construction. one five five five part one and part two cover airborne and impact sound insulation respectively. For walls between dwellings, the requirement is an apparent weighted sound reduction index of at least fifty decibels for airborne sound — roughly S.For impact sound, the maximum permitted sound pressure level in the receiving room is fifty-five decibels from a standard tapping machine. These are comparable to European norms.
The law says walls should perform at S.fifty, but in practice nobody's verifying this.
And the gap between the standard on paper and what's actually built is vast. I've measured walls in relatively new Jerusalem apartment buildings — just using a decibel meter app — and you can easily get forty decibel readings from normal conversation next door. That suggests the actual S.is in the low thirties. That's less than half the performance the standard requires, in decibel terms.
Let's talk about flanking more concretely. You mentioned the concrete frame. What other paths does sound take?
Electrical outlets are a classic. If you and your neighbor have outlets on opposite sides of the same wall in the same stud bay, you've essentially got a hole through your sound barrier. Same with light switches, plumbing penetrations, ventilation ducts. Any discontinuity in the wall is a sound leak. Proper acoustic construction uses putty pads behind outlet boxes, acoustic sealant around every penetration, and never places outlets back-to-back in party walls.
I'm imagining the typical Israeli contractor reading this and laughing.
Honestly, most of them wouldn't even know what a putty pad is. And that's not me being snobbish — it's just not part of the standard building culture here. The techniques aren't complicated, they're not even that expensive in material terms, but they require awareness and care. You have to know that sealing a gap matters. You have to care about the difference between a continuous bead of acoustic sealant and a few dabs of caulk.
Daniel also asked about the flip side — if he wants to play studio monitors loudly without bothering neighbors. What's the approach there?
That's a different order of problem. Listening to music at a satisfying level in a studio context — you're talking maybe eighty-five to ninety decibels at the listening position. To contain that so your neighbor hears essentially nothing, you need an S.of sixty-five plus. That's recording studio territory. You're not getting there with a double-stud wall alone. You need a room-within-a-room.
Which is exactly what it sounds like.
You build a completely independent room inside the existing room, floating on isolation pads so it has no rigid connection to the structure. The inner room has its own floor, its own walls, its own ceiling, all mechanically decoupled from the outer shell. The air gap is typically a hundred to two hundred millimeters, filled with acoustic absorption material. The inner room is heavy — multiple layers of drywall or specialty acoustic panels. The door is a heavy acoustic door with magnetic seals. Ventilation is through baffled silencer boxes. It's a serious construction project.
What does that cost, roughly?
For a small studio room — say twelve to fifteen square meters — you're looking at anywhere from forty to eighty thousand shekels if you're doing it properly with a contractor who knows acoustics. Could be double that for a high-end music production space. It's not trivial. But for someone doing professional audio work, it's an investment that pays off in being able to work whenever you want without constraints.
There's a middle ground though, right? Daniel's not necessarily building Abbey Road. He wants to listen to studio monitors at a reasonable level without feeling self-conscious.
Let's say you're in an existing apartment and you want to improve things without a full gut renovation. The most effective retrofit is adding a layer of mass-loaded vinyl or acoustic drywall on resilient channels attached to the existing wall. Resilient channels are metal strips that decouple the new drywall from the studs or block behind it. You screw the channel to the wall, then screw the drywall to the channel. The channel flexes slightly, breaking the rigid connection.
It's a retrofit version of decoupling.
A single layer of five-eighths-inch drywall on resilient channels over an existing block wall, with the cavity filled with mineral wool insulation, can take you from S.forty-five to S.fifty-five or better. You lose maybe forty millimeters of room depth. The critical detail is that the channels must be installed correctly — screws can't bridge through the drywall into the stud behind, because that shorts out the decoupling. One careless screw ruins the whole assembly's performance.
That sounds like exactly the kind of detail that gets missed.
All the time. I've seen acoustic retrofits where the contractor used regular drywall screws that were too long, went right through the resilient channel, and anchored into the stud. Congratulations, you've just built a slightly thicker standard wall at three times the cost. Zero acoustic benefit.
Let's talk about floors and ceilings, because I know from experience that upstairs neighbors are their own category of misery.
Impact noise from above is probably the number one complaint in multi-unit buildings worldwide. And it's the hardest to fix after the fact. The physics is unforgiving — a hard object hitting a hard surface creates a vibration that travels through the structure with very little loss. You can have excellent airborne sound isolation between floors and still hear every footstep like a drum.
What's the right way?
The finished floor surface sits on a layer of resilient material — typically a rubber or cork underlayment — and is not rigidly connected to the structural slab. The impact energy hits the floor surface, compresses the resilient layer, and very little transmits to the structure below. For new construction, this is straightforward. For retrofit, you can use acoustic underlayments under laminate or engineered wood flooring. The best ones use recycled rubber or specialty acoustic foam, and they can reduce impact sound transmission by twenty to twenty-five decibels.
What's the standard Israeli apartment floor?
Ceramic tile directly on the concrete structural slab. Sometimes with a thin layer of thinset mortar, sometimes not even that. It's about as bad as it gets for impact sound transmission. No decoupling whatsoever. Every chair scrape, every dropped object, every heel strike transmits directly into the structure.
I've lived that exact experience. You learn your upstairs neighbor's walking patterns. You know when they're in the kitchen versus the bedroom. It's intimate in a way nobody asked for.
The psychological effect is underappreciated. Chronic exposure to unpredictable noise — intermittent noise, as opposed to continuous background noise — is genuinely stressful. It triggers a low-grade fight-or-flight response. Your brain can't fully tune it out because it might be a signal that requires attention. Studies show it elevates cortisol levels, disrupts sleep architecture even if you don't fully wake up, and correlates with higher rates of anxiety and cardiovascular issues over time.
Daniel's frustration isn't just annoyance — it's a genuine health consideration.
The World Health Organization has guidelines on community noise that specifically address this. Nighttime noise levels outside bedrooms should not exceed forty decibels to protect sleep quality. A quiet suburban street at night is around forty decibels. A moderately busy urban street is sixty to seventy. If your windows are S.thirty, a seventy-decibel street becomes forty decibels inside — right at the threshold. If your windows are S.twenty-six, you're at forty-four decibels inside, which is enough to measurably disturb sleep.
Daniel mentioned honking specifically. Short, loud, unpredictable.
Horn honking is the worst-case urban noise. A car horn at close range can hit a hundred to a hundred and ten decibels. Even with decent windows, that's going to penetrate. The frequency content is also problematic — horns are heavy in the one to four kilohertz range, right where human hearing is most sensitive. And the startle response to a sudden horn is hardwired. You can't habituate to it the way you can to steady traffic drone.
What's the solution on the street noise side?
It's layers, always. The windows are the first line of defense, and they need to be acoustic — laminated, asymmetrical, well-sealed. But windows are only part of the wall. If the wall itself is a single layer of block with no insulation, sound comes through the wall too. You need to treat the whole facade as a system. External insulation with a ventilated facade can add significant mass and decoupling. Even heavy curtains inside help — not dramatically, but every few decibels counts. And if you're building new, orienting bedrooms away from the street, using the building's own mass as a sound barrier, is just good design.
Let's circle back to something Daniel said. He mentioned that acoustic windows are probably a realistic dream that people could just put in, but they cheap out on it. There's a frustration there that I share — the solutions exist, they're not exotic technology, and yet they're almost never deployed in the rental market.
This is the landlord incentive problem in a nutshell. The person paying for the upgrade is not the person who benefits from it. A landlord installing acoustic windows might be able to charge slightly higher rent, but in a market as tight as Jerusalem's, the apartment will rent anyway. There's no competitive pressure to improve acoustic quality because desperate tenants don't have the luxury of being picky about soundproofing.
Even if they are picky, you can't really assess sound isolation during a fifteen-minute apartment viewing.
You might notice obvious problems — if the viewing happens during a noisy period — but you won't know that the neighbor's television sounds like it's in your bedroom until you've already signed a year's lease. It's a classic information asymmetry. The landlord knows, or should know, but the tenant can't discover the problem until it's too late.
The market doesn't solve this. If anything, the market actively works against acoustic quality in rentals.
That's why regulation matters. In countries that do this well — Germany, Switzerland, the Nordic countries — acoustic standards are taken seriously at the building code level, and enforcement is real. Germany's D.four one zero nine standard for sound insulation is comprehensive and mandatory. New construction has to meet specific S.and impact sound ratings, and there's testing to verify compliance. It's not optional, and it's not something developers can skip to save money.
Israel's standard, as you mentioned, exists on paper but isn't enforced.
And there's a cultural dimension too. Israel is a loud country. People talk loudly, they play music loudly, they honk freely. There's a tolerance for noise that's higher than in some other cultures. That's not a criticism — it's an observation. But it means the baseline expectation of acoustic privacy is lower. People are surprised when you complain about noise that seems normal to them.
Which creates a feedback loop. If nobody expects good sound isolation, nobody demands it, and developers have no reason to provide it.
Breaking that loop requires awareness and advocacy. Daniel's prompt is actually part of that — someone who's experienced the problem, understands it's not inevitable, and wants to know what doing it right looks like.
Let's get practical for someone in Daniel's position. He's renting now, but he and his architect wife are thinking about building or buying. What should they look for? What questions should they ask?
If they're buying an existing apartment, the first thing is to visit at different times of day, especially evening and early morning. Ask the seller if you can spend thirty minutes in the apartment alone, in silence, just listening. Most people don't do this. You'll learn more about the acoustic reality in that half hour than from any inspection report.
If they're building from scratch?
Then they have real leverage. fifty-five minimum for all party walls and floors. That's above the code minimum but absolutely achievable with standard techniques. Specify acoustic windows with laminated glass and a minimum S.For the floor, specify a floating floor system with a resilient underlayment rated for at least twenty decibels of impact sound reduction. And here's the key — put all of this in the contract with the contractor. Make it a line item, not a vague aspiration. Specify that acoustic performance will be verified by testing before final payment.
Will contractors actually agree to that?
The good ones will. The ones who refuse are telling you something important about their confidence in their own work. And yes, it might limit your contractor options and it might add ten to fifteen percent to the finishing costs. But we're talking about something you'll live with every single day for years or decades. The cost per day of good sound isolation is tiny.
What about the studio monitor situation? If Daniel wants a room where he can mix audio at reasonable volumes without worrying about neighbors, what's the practical path?
Within a new build, it's much easier. You designate the studio room early in the design phase. You build it with double-stud walls, a floating floor, and an isolated ceiling. You pay special attention to the door — a solid-core door with acoustic seals, ideally an exterior-grade door with a threshold seal. You put the ventilation on a separate duct run with in-line silencers. The cost for one room done properly, if it's planned from the start, is maybe twenty to thirty thousand shekels above standard construction for that room. In the context of building a whole house or apartment, that's manageable.
If you're retrofitting an existing room?
Then you're looking at room-within-a-room as we discussed, or a more modest version — resilient channels on all surfaces, multiple layers of drywall with Green Glue or a similar damping compound between layers, acoustic sealant everywhere, and a heavy door. You can probably get to S.fifty-five to sixty without floating the floor, which avoids the complexity of raising the floor and dealing with door thresholds. That's enough to contain studio monitors at moderate levels. Not enough for a drum kit, but enough for mixing and editing.
Green Glue — what is that exactly?
It's a viscoelastic damping compound. You apply it between two layers of drywall, and it converts sound vibration into tiny amounts of heat. It's not an adhesive — you still screw the drywall — but it damps the resonance of the assembly. Two layers of drywall with Green Glue between them can outperform three layers without it. It's one of those products that seems like snake oil until you look at the lab data.
I want to talk about a failure mode we haven't mentioned that I bet is everywhere in Israeli apartments — the front door.
Oh, this is a big one. The typical Israeli apartment door is a hollow metal door with gaps around the frame you can see daylight through. It's a gaping acoustic hole. You can have the best walls in the world, but if your front door is a hollow slab with no seals, you'll hear every conversation in the stairwell.
People don't think about it because it's not a shared wall. But the stairwell is an echo chamber that amplifies everything.
A proper acoustic door is solid, heavy, and sealed on all four sides with compression gaskets. There's also a threshold seal at the bottom — either an automatic drop seal that engages when the door closes, or a fixed threshold with a gasket. That alone can take you from S.twenty to S.thirty-five or forty. It's one of the most cost-effective upgrades in an apartment.
What about ventilation? If you seal everything up for sound, don't you create a ventilation problem?
A properly sealed acoustic envelope needs mechanical ventilation. In a passive house or high-performance building, you've got a heat recovery ventilator bringing in fresh air and exhausting stale air, all through ducts. Those ducts need to be acoustically treated — lined with absorption material, with baffle boxes at penetrations — so they don't become sound highways between rooms. It's more complex than just opening a window, but it's also healthier. You get filtered air, controlled humidity, and no street noise.
That's starting to sound like a fundamentally different philosophy of building. Not just adding acoustic features to a standard design, but designing around acoustic performance from the start.
That's exactly what the best buildings do. And it's not just about sound — it's about comfort in a holistic sense. Thermal comfort, acoustic comfort, indoor air quality. They're all connected. A building that's well-insulated for sound is usually well-insulated for temperature. A building with controlled ventilation is quieter and healthier. The passive house standard, which originated in Germany, treats the building as a system. Sound insulation is part of it by default, not an afterthought.
Is anyone in Israel building to passive house standards?
A handful of projects. There's a small but growing passive house community here. The challenge is that it requires a level of detailing and quality control that the Israeli construction industry isn't set up for. The skills gap is real. You need crews who understand airtightness, who know how to tape seams properly, who won't punch holes through your carefully designed acoustic envelope to run a cable and then fill the hole with expanding foam.
That's the cultural piece again. The building culture.
Culture changes slowly. But it does change. Look at what's happened with energy efficiency. Twenty years ago, nobody in Israel thought about insulation. Now it's standard to have some. The same could happen with acoustics, especially as more people work from home and the expectation of domestic quiet rises.
Daniel's prompt also hints at something broader — the gap between what's technically possible and what's commonly done. We have the knowledge to build apartments where you can't hear your neighbors. We've had it for decades. The principles of mass-spring-mass isolation were understood by the nineteen fifties. The materials exist. The techniques are documented. And yet here we are, in two thousand twenty-six, with people in million-shekel apartments listening to their neighbors' playlists.
That's the frustration, isn't it? It's not a technology problem. It's an incentives problem, a regulation problem, and an awareness problem. The technology is mature. A double-stud wall with mineral wool and two layers of drywall on each side — that's nineteenth-century materials assembled in a twentieth-century configuration. It just requires the will to do it.
The willingness to lose a few centimeters of floor area.
Which is the real sticking point. In a market where square meter price is everything, every centimeter of wall thickness is a cost. But here's the counterpoint — how much is acoustic privacy worth per square meter? If you could pay five percent more per square meter and never hear your neighbors, would you do it? I think a lot of people would, if they understood the alternative.
The challenge is that the market doesn't offer that choice in a transparent way. You can't walk into a sales office and see an S.rating for the party walls. You can't compare acoustic performance between buildings the way you can compare floor area or parking spots. The information isn't available.
You'd need mandatory disclosure. Like an energy rating, but for sound.
Some countries do this. In Australia, there's a star rating system for acoustic performance in apartments. In the U., new-build homes have sound insulation testing as part of building regulations compliance, and the results are supposed to be available. It's not perfect, but it creates accountability. The developer knows they'll be tested, so they pay attention to the details.
Let's bring this back to Daniel's specific situation. He's in a rental now, he's frustrated, he's dreaming of building properly. What's his move? What's the one thing you'd tell him to prioritize?
I'd say windows first. They're the hardest to retrofit well, and they address both external noise and thermal comfort. Get genuine acoustic windows — laminated glass, asymmetrical panes, wide cavity, compression seals. Budget for them. They're the single highest-impact upgrade for urban noise. Second, if you're building walls between you and neighbors, do double-stud with mineral wool and two layers of drywall on each side. That's your baseline for never hearing music through the wall. Third, floating floors everywhere, not just in the studio room. Impact noise is insidious and hard to fix later. Fourth, solid doors with acoustic seals. All of them, not just the front door.
For the studio specifically?
If the budget allows, room-within-a-room. If not, resilient channels, double drywall with damping compound, and a heavy solid-core door with seals. That plus the acoustic windows will let him monitor at reasonable levels without worrying. He won't be able to crank a subwoofer at midnight, but he'll be able to work comfortably during normal hours.
There's something satisfying about this. The solutions are concrete. They have numbers attached. ratings, decibel reductions, millimeter thicknesses. It's not magic.
That's what I love about acoustics. It's physics you can specify and measure. You can say "I want S.fifty-five" and then test whether you got it. There's no mystery. The mystery is only why we so rarely bother.
I think that's where Daniel's architect wife comes in. She's in a position to specify these things, to put them in drawings, to hold contractors accountable. That's a real advantage. Most people don't have an architect in the family when they're dealing with this stuff.
She'll know how to detail the junctions, how to specify the assemblies, how to write the contract language. The knowledge gap we've been talking about — they can bridge it. And honestly, I'd love to hear what they end up doing. If they build this place, I want a tour.
You just want to test the S.ratings with your decibel meter app.
You know I do.
Let's hit one more thing before we wrap — the emotional dimension. Daniel's prompt has this undercurrent of exhaustion. Ten years of rental instability, of being kicked out, of cheap construction, of noise you can't escape. There's something about acoustic privacy that's connected to dignity. The ability to close your door and be in your own world.
That's beautifully put. And it's real. Home is supposed to be refuge. When you can hear your neighbors' music, their arguments, their coughs — you're not fully in your own space. The boundary is permeable in a way that erodes something important. It's hard to relax when you're bracing for the next horn honk or the next thump from upstairs.
It's cumulative. One noisy evening is annoying. A year of them is corrosive.
There's research on this. Chronic noise exposure correlates with learned helplessness in children — the sense that you can't control your environment, so why try. It affects cognitive development, reading comprehension, attention. The effects are most pronounced in lower-income households that can't afford to move away from noise sources. It's an environmental justice issue hiding in plain sight.
Which makes the landlord incentive problem even more galling. The people who suffer most from bad acoustics are the ones with the least power to change their situation.
That's why building standards matter. They're a floor — not a ceiling. They protect people who can't afford to spec their own acoustic upgrades. A well-enforced acoustic standard in the building code is a public health measure as much as a comfort measure.
Daniel, when you build, you're not just building for yourself. You're demonstrating what's possible. You're creating a data point that says, look, this can be done in Israel, it doesn't cost a fortune, and the result is a home that actually feels like a home.
Maybe his architect wife gets to be the person who brings these details to other projects. That's how building culture changes — one project, one detail, one contractor who learns a new technique and carries it forward.
Alright, I think we've given Daniel a pretty thorough answer. Acoustic windows with laminated asymmetrical glass, double-stud walls with mineral wool, floating floors, sealed doors, and for the studio, resilient channels with damping compound at minimum. The principles are mass, separation, and damping. The failure mode is almost always shortcuts — rigid connections where there should be decoupling, gaps where there should be seals, single-layer where there should be mass.
The biggest failure mode of all: nobody testing whether any of it actually works.
Don't trust that it was done right just because it looks right.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn. It has been since the twelfth century, when it first appeared on the Scottish royal coat of arms. Scotland is one of the only countries in the world whose national animal is a mythical creature.
remarkably on-brand for Scotland, actually.
I have questions about the zoological vetting process, but I'll let them go.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, tell a friend who's ever heard their neighbor's television through the wall — which is basically everyone in a city. Find us at myweirdprompts.com. We're back soon with a new topic.
