{"id":47,"date":"2016-10-17T11:52:52","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T16:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/?p=47"},"modified":"2016-10-23T02:39:25","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T07:39:25","slug":"on-crappy-weather-and-new-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/2016\/10\/17\/on-crappy-weather-and-new-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"On Crappy Weather and New Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Weather

Weather BEFORE.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/u>Weather. We all talk about it in very banal terms, often as a placeholder for other, more meaningful conversations or a way of breaking bread with other people given a better idea, but we never usually take the time to really realize what an undue influence it has on our thoughts, behavior, and lives. I think about it even less than other people do; while the weather is always on the tip of other\u2019s people\u2019s tongues, it\u2019s always at the base of mine. (Weird and creepy metaphors for 100!) That has not been the case since I arrived here in Copenhagen.<\/p>\n

Background: I\u2019m always the one that is under-dressed or dressed incorrectly for the weather, often because I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing with life but also because I desperately want to convince myself that weather\u00a0<\/em>doesn\u2019t affect me in the same way that it does other people. (Ask anybody that knows me and common sense isn’t always my strong suit.) I\u2019m always the person that is asked \u201cOH, you\u2019re just wearing that?\u201d or \u201cDo you want my jacket? I\u2019m sure it would make you a lot more comfortable.\u201d Firstly, no I don\u2019t, so please stop asking me! But I\u2019m incredibly stubborn as well, so sometimes I do and I\u2019m just putting on a show. (Maybe.) I always prefer comfort to being over-dressed, and this has made me, to some extent, more tolerant of the weather but also less interested in it and less able to notice the small temperature differences that others seem to. Maybe a little arrogant, too.<\/p>\n

I do tend to do a lot better in the cold than in the heat. Part of this is how silly and ridiculous I look in shorts (can\u2019t be just me), but I always prefer to warm up rather than cool down. Maybe it has to do with me, at my core, being an introvert who prefers the comfort of cooler climes to the excitement of nice weather and crazy beach days, but I prefer cooler weather and have always tended to like places where the temperatures skew on the cooler side of temperate than the hotter side of temperate. For some who know me, this might seem counterintuitive given my love of going barefoot, but I would always prefer temperatures of 50 degrees Fahrenheit (9-10 degrees Celsius) and sunny to the type of weather that forces me into shorts every day. Extreme weather in the cold direction tends to be fine for me so long as it is not accompanied by extreme winds, complete and total cloud hour, and rapidly diminishing daylight hours.<\/p>\n

So, while I am indeed an idiot, this idea of me \u201cwilling something into existence\u201d is to some extent true in this case. Years of being improperly dressed has forced me into a tolerance for cold that seems to be much higher than that of a lot of other people, even those from a similar climate. Perhaps I do have a better system for regulating my internal management of temperature difference, but, really, I have kind of\u00a0willed myself into an attitude for weather that seems more like \u201cWe\u2019ll get through this\u201d than other people, for whom it predominates the conversation.\u00a0All that has gone out the window since I’ve been here in Copenhagen, where I constantly talk and think about the weather.<\/p>\n

After an unusually nice September in the city (which, as I was reminded many times, was very unusual and I should be grateful for it), October has slowly begun to kick my ass. Despite\u00a0going to Ireland for a semester — where I was struck by the constant rain — I was not ready. Denmark seems committed at every level to reminding you of the fact that it is a flat, grey little country and you can either accept it with all its introverted, fun-loving eccentricity and rules or get the hell out. I do respect that, and I do not mind the cold, but after your 10th<\/sup> straight day of cloud cover, the one hour where the winds slow down and you see a beam of light from the sky seems to, quite literally, be sent from the heavens. Seriously, it rains more than half of the week and I\u2019m constantly looking for signs of light, not to mention almost getting knocked off my bike by wind half the days I cycle into the university.<\/p>\n

Aside from that, though, it\u2019s lovely. I swear. #WelcomeToScandinavia<\/p>\n

\"Weather

Weather AFTER.<\/p><\/div>\n

All of this reminds me, though, that one of the most interesting things to\u00a0me about traveling is going to cities and towns and talking to locals, and realizing that each area really does have its own personality. This personality can, in turn, be directly related to the weather. Not indirectly, mind you, but directly; correlation does in fact equal causation in this case., and the patterns of weather are very much emblematic of the types of people toy will find.<\/p>\n

With some of our own limited knowledge of weather systems, some of it doesn\u2019t make intuitive sense: like why, given the latitude, I experience much sharper extremes of cold in New England but don\u2019t have all the grey, existential doom-and-gloom of flat and insular little Denmark. You can easily\u00a0see the weather reflected in the people that live here. In Denmark, everything is very eccentric, precise, homogenous, shy, and orderly,; though, unlike the Swedes it seems they are not afraid to have fun. (Already picking up on local stereotypes. Ahem.) You can find evidence of this as a reaction to the weather: like in their day-to-day life, everybody puts their nose down to get through life most of the year, but then the times when it is sunny they really know how to enjoy themselves. In all of it, they seem to very much be themselves and, like the weather, you can take it or leave it. The personality suits me, I just wish it had some of the inconsistency of weather in New England, which serves to remind you that there is still a a world beyond the clouds.<\/p>\n

One of the side-effects of the nice\/crappy weather divide is, of course, the attendant change that you notice in your social life. Being new to a place, it is especially pronounced. The first month here, it seemed like every night we would just drink beer by the river, or every day we could sit outside in between or after classes and just be happy to be in a new place. I actively enjoyed my bike rides and wasn\u2019t at all taken back by the acuteness of the wind gusts or randomness of the rain. As with any change to Fall or Winter, I\u00a0knew it wasn\u2019t going to last forever, but the shift\u00a0was definitely more\u00a0sudden than I was used to. After four weeks of mostly sun and sometimes nice temperatures, the weather very abruptly gave up and said see you in April.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a bad thing, but it has meant thinking more about my\u00a0days in advance. All of my friends here are still people that I\u2019ve met in Global Development, and with the the nice weather has gone the\u00a0lack of planning which made it easy to go from one thing to the next and meet new people. Now that the weather is, uh, shite, and the days are darker and colder, it makes me look back with nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses (already) at the romantic, fun-loving first month of yore. I\u2019m already beginning to understand what the Danes talk about when they talk about hygge<\/em>, because when it\u2019s cold and getting darker by several minutes<\/em> per day, it seems like the only option to preserve your sanity in between endless amounts of reading and trying to get settled and develop a routine in a new location. I was almost there, and then the weather happened.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On a serious note, I am grateful for how easy my life has been here in terms of meeting new people and developing connections. After just seven weeks I feel like I\u2019ve developed such great\u00a0rapport with people I didn\u2019t even know two months ago. The small, structured, and focused nature of my program is conducive to that; we\u2019re all studying the exact same things and have the same course load and schedule. It\u2019s easy and natural, even if it doesn\u2019t feel earned because we\u2019re all forced into the same conditions and structure and use Facebook to mediate every social encounter. I\u2019m still looking to meet more people locally, but in terms of the people I\u2019ve met I\u2019m grateful that the growth of a social life was easy and fast, if uneven. Hopefully that will continue on unabetted, despite the weather’s insistence to the contrary. (And perhaps\u00a0dating is a thing I should look into as well.)<\/p>\n

So, in order to escape my existential dread about the weather (and the price of living, I might add) and meet new people, I will be escaping to the (probably not much warmer) climes of Berlin and Prague this week. We have a week’s break from school for lord knows what reason, and I will be using it to maximum effect. I\u2019m looking forward to good beer, castles, museums, and, just maybe, a little bit of sun.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned for more stories about experiencing your own culture from the outside.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weather. We all talk about it in very banal terms, often as a placeholder for other, more meaningful conversations or a way of breaking bread with other people given a better idea, but we never usually take the time to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":447,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/447"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uml.edu\/on-traveling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}