before i came down here to the antipodes (i love that word.
ok, in other words-australia and new zealand. is new zealand part of the antipodes? for the sake of this update let’s assume that it is) people were warning me that ‘its winter in the southern hemisphere so you need to bring warm clothes cos it’s very cold!’
so i’m wondering if it was very cold in sydney when i was walking around in the sunshine in jeans and a t-shirt. or perhaps it was very cold this morning in melbourne when i went for a nice walk through a park full of palm trees and sunlight, again wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
the antipodean idea of cold might be a little, uh, hyperbolic. last night i was with some friends and i was explaining that when i was growing up in connecticut winter meant walking to school through snow and sleet and occasionally waking up to days where the temperature was zero degrees fahrenheit (which i’m assuming is -15 celsius). and i was explaining that there are parts of the midwest (minnesota, the great plains states, etc) where it gets so cold that it’s literally impossible to leave your house without suffering from almost instantaneous hypothermia.
i’m not bragging about the nasty, bitter cold that most people who live in north america have grown up with, i’m just expressing bewilderment that anyone could consider 60 degrees fahrenheit (which is 14 degrees celsius?) to be cold.
cold is when your nose is in agony just from inhaling. cold is huge plumes of breath-vapor every time you exhale. cold is walking to school with the sound of your feet cracking through the frozen snow. cold is not being able to see outside because of the ice on the inside of your windows.
and i’m jealous. can you imagine how happy and well adjusted we’d all be if we’d grown up in a place that was lovely and warm most the time?
the weather in most of north america is so bizarre. in the winters it’s like being in siberia and in the summers it’s like being in venezuela. no wonder all of the roads are falling apart.
it’s a wonder that roads in north america actually last more than a year or two, what with the temperature extremes. how strange that in most of north america it’s common for people to die of exposure to the cold in the wintertime and then heatstroke in the summer.
most of us norteamericanos grew up with these circumstances, but after travelling around the world i have yet to find anywhere else that has such climatic extremes.
and i love it when friends of mine from overseas visit new york in the wintertime and say ‘i didn’t know it could ever be this cold’ and then they come back in the summertime and say ‘i didn’t know it could ever be this hot’.
it’s weird, huh.
time for interviews. maybe i’ll bore the journalists with my weather obsessions, too.
-moby