Brrrrrrrrr!
July 1st, 2010
The last few days in Melbourne have been cold (that’s a pic of me walking to my flat yesterday), including the coldest day in two years where the mercury didn’t quite make it to 10°C (50 fahrenheit). We do complain about the cold here in Melbourne (well, my mum and dad certainly do), but it’s not really that cold. The coldest overnight low we’ve ever had was -2°C (27 fahrenheit). That’s nothing. My girlfriend Beth comes from Minneapolis, Minnesota where it’s often below zero for more than three months of the year (as in it doesn’t get above zero at all in that time!). The coldest day recorded in Minneapolis is -41°C (-41.8 fahrenheit – celsius and fahrenheit actually catch up at -42). And it’s regularly gets to -30°C during the winter in Minneapolis (no wonder Beth thinks it’s positively balmy here in Melbourne). That’s not quite as cold as the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.2°C in Vostock Station, Antartica, but when it comes to freezing cold I don’t think there’s much splitting frozen nostril hairs between -41°C and -89.2°C. That’s fricken cold either way. The coldest I have been in all of my travels is -22°C in Niseko, Japan (a balmy spring day in Minneapolis). It was so cold that in between ski runs I would duck into the mens toilets and put my feet under the hand drier to thaw them out. And the cold may have also affected my brain because that same day (or night actually) I stripped off naked and ran through the snow to jump into an outdoor onsen then rolled around in the snow (that too may have killed a few more brain cells).
Then again, Beth might be for a bit of a surprise when summer hits in Melbourne. The hottest temperature I’ve ever experienced was here in Melbourne last year when we got to 46.5°C (the hottest recorded temperature by the way is 57.8 °C in Al ‘Azizivah, Libya). I have been to much hotter places than Melbourne in my travels, though. Thankfully we have air conditioning in most places here, so you can get away from the heat, but some places I’ve been to there was no escape at all. In Togo, West Africa it may have only been in the mid-30s, but it was pretty much 100% humidity and there was no respite from the stifling heat (except the local bank, where I spent 3 hours pretending to wait to see someone). Most of the hotel rooms I stayed in had no air-conditioning, so I would get up a few times a night and have a cold shower just to stop myself from self-combusting. I got used to sitting in restaurants with sweat dripping of my chin as I ate my food and I got used to walking around all day with sopping wet clothes and sweaty underpants. Mind you, with another two months of winter here in Melbourne to look forward to I wouldn’t mind a few days of sweaty underpants at the moment.
On July 2nd, 2010 Amanda Callahan said: