As promised several months ago while we froze our butts off on a daily basis and cried about how the temperature would never rise above 0 degrees (Celsius, to all of my Western friends who are cringing), the weather has officially changed to SUMMER in South Korea!!!
The good news: It’s no longer cold! I’m feeling brave enough to sleep soundly at night without fear of being found the next morning as a block of ice!
The bad news: It is now hot as Satan’s breath outside. Sleeping before 1 AM is a futile effort as it is simply too hot to lay your head down until the temperature outside goes down.
I can’t complain too much. After all, we continuously begged Mother Nature to warm it up just a bit, and she clearly took our complaints to heart. That being said, I always heard there were 4 seasons in Korea, and Spring was supposed to come in order to slowly prepare our minds and bodies for the onslaught that summer was going to unleash. No such preparation event occurred, which means we are now utterly defenseless and woefully unprepared in the face of our new enemy: HUMIDITY.
I grew up in Texas for over half my life which means I am no stranger to the sun, sweat, or near death defying temperatures. I spent two straight Summers working outside for a camp and there were whole WEEKS when the temperature did not drop below 100 degrees. We would joke together that it was “Only 110 today!” when in fact there was nothing funny about walking outside and immediately feeling like you’d walked into a furnace. But hey, it wasn’t 120 which is both a real and extremely likely scenario in July.
“So if you’ve survived all that,” you may be asking, “What’s the big deal about a little heat? Shouldn’t you have been ready?”
My answer to that, dear friends, is I should have been. The real answer, I most definitely was not. You see, Korean Summer doesn’t just mean ‘hot’, it also means ‘humid’. Texas heat is normally bone dry, continuous and expected. Here, the humidity in the air is downright oppressive. I could probably drink the water molecules straight out of the AIR if I didn’t know it would be the temperature of lukewarm tea. Always just above bearable, the temperature with humidity can make 85 degrees Fahrenheit days can feel like 105 degrees.
I can deal with all of that though. After all, we don’t have to be outside that often. The walk to school in the morning and evening so far haven’t been too bad because the temperatures aren’t as high as around 2 PM. Anytime I go out on the weekend it’s normally at night or close enough to my apartment that I’m not panting by the time I reach my destination.
What I can not cope with is the lack of A/C.
Korea is EXTREMELY energy conscious, which means many places, including school, only turn on the A/C in dire situations. For the most part we just open windows or turn on a fan, which is totally fine if you haven’t just hiked uphill for 30 minutes to get there and want to be cool as soon as you walk in the door. This goes for our apartments as well.
I have both a fan and A/C but have been too afraid of my electricity bill to turn on the latter just yet. I would leave the fan on at night but Koreans wholeheartedly believe in “fan death” and I refuse to be the first foreigner victim because of my skepticism.
So, because it’s not quite acceptably hot enough at this point to continuously use A/C, but also too hot to simply do NOTHING, this is me during the day:
And at night…
I’m sure that we will all find ways to cope during this brief two month struggle against Summer’s death rays. Until then, we will be coming up with ever creative ways to survive. I have taken to napping with ice on my neck. A friend of mine moved his bed to right underneath his window, which essentially means he now sleeps on his balcony. We’ve all given up on hot showers entirely, instead choosing to live like they did in the old days and pretending our shower is a cold stream.
At this point we can only (sadly) look forward to the rainy season which is supposed to be upon us in the next month or so. Until then, if you happen to hear of a puddle on the side of the road, assume that it is me for it probably is.
Daebak Dayz 