Day Three: How does the weather affect you?
Oh boy. Okay, I haven't really gone into detail yet what the weather is like here, and I've been meaning to. So this question is rather convenient.
First let's see what Weather Underground has to say on the subject:
That sounds decent, right? WRONG. It is hot hot hot hot HOT.
The forecast doesn't give an accurate description of the weather because it fails to mention the humidity. I don't know exactly how humid it is most of the time but it must get into the 90% range. I've never felt humidity remotely this bad before. As a result, mold and mildew are everywhere, all the time... good thing I'm not allergic.
Also, the sun just FEELS hotter here. Sometimes I'm convinced that Dominica is not just a little island in the Caribbean Sea, it's actually its own planet that is much closer to the sun than Earth is.
Living in a jungle next to the sun is... an experience. Before we moved here I'd look at weather forecasts and think, oh wow! I love weather in the upper 80s! I'm going to be so happy there! Yeah, it's nothing like that. Staying hydrated is a constant battle. Walking anywhere outside requires drinking a full bottle of water afterward just to replace what was lost in sweat. I think I have sweat more in the past month than I have in the whole rest of my life combined. And I am not normally a sweaty person. Sometimes I come home and find that I am sweating from a new and unique place that I thought couldn't even produce moisture, like the front of my knees.
Okay, so back to the question at hand. The weather affects me a lot here, largely because we live so far from campus. If I had a five minute walk to the pool, or the air-conditioned CAC, I would probably hang out there a lot more. But it's 20 minutes if I walk at a decent clip. That makes me lazy and choose instead to sit in front of the fan at home and catch up on tv shows. Michiganders, I doubt any of you can blame me for this. We were a collective bunch of babies when the temperature last summer got over 100 degrees, and with the heat index that's exactly how hot it is here every day.
However, I am slowly getting used to the heat. When walking to campus I used to want to turn around and go back home after about... I don't know, two houses down the street? Now I can get almost 3/4 of the way to campus before I start whining to myself. Pretty soon I'll just have to work on the motivation to actually leave at will to go do stuff. I REALLY can't wait to move to Picard.
I've heard rumors that January-March are much nicer, and you can actually walk around outside without melting. Apparently, next semester will be amazing! So, everyone who wants to come visit me, I advise you choose wisely.
Oh, and one other thing about the weather. It rains every day here. Sometimes during a big storm, it rains all day and I don't even try to go anywhere. Every time it rains it's the slanty sort that gets you completely soaked even when you have an umbrella. Most days, it just rains lightly for a few minutes at a time. But the weird thing is that there are never any clouds directly overhead when it's raining. They are far away, and you can look up and see beautiful blue sky. The first couple times it happened I thought I was going crazy. Now I'm just used to carrying an umbrella everywhere. Bonus: makes a great sun shade.
On a completely unrelated note, while walking home today I saw a local guy selling homemade guava jam out of the back of his truck. In Michigan I would have thought "Hmm, shady-looking random guy selling 'jam' with a handwritten label on a questionably clean jar out of his truck bed... uh, no thanks, I'll pass on the Rohypnol." Instead all I thought was "Guava jam! I wonder if that's delicious. Maybe I should buy some." This before I realized I don't even care for jam. Hope my stomach is just as ready for adventure as the rest of me.
