That was the newspaper headline last week when we had a cold
snap here in Hilton. At the risk of
stating the obvious, it’s late fall/early winter here in South Africa. The big local news last week was that you
could see snow in the distance on the Drakensburg Mountains. (We looked and couldn’t see any, but I’ll
trust the locals are not just pulling my leg.)
That means it’s really cold here and people who heard my foreign accent
were apologizing to me for it getting down to about 35°F at night, and assuring
me that it would warm up.
We are from Minnesota, so we know cold weather. And even anecdotally comparing ourselves to
others in Minnesota, we enjoy cold weather more than most. So before our trip when the Binions told us
their tricks for saying warm (microwaving denim rice bags, be sure to pack warm
pajamas and good socks) we sort of chuckled.
I mean really, it basically never snows in Hilton, and in Minnesota we
get multiple feet of snow each winter.
How shocking to my system could it really be?
So, um, yeah, trust advice from the locals. It gets
cold here. Really cold. The crucial difference is that homes here
have no central heat. So when it’s 40
degrees outside, it’s quickly 40 degrees inside. That makes getting out of bed in the morning
a beast. They do have space heaters,
electric and gas, but they are fire hazards to run at night. (And the big gas heater makes us nervous with
kids around…so they go to bed and then we can enjoy the nice gas heater. It’s bed time for the kiddos so Mommy and
Daddy can warm up!) So keeping warm at
night requires old fashioned layers of clothes and blankets. It sort of reminds me of late fall or early
spring camping in Minnesota, in that you just bundle up, tough it out, enjoy
all of the non-weather-related things, and look forward to that nice warm mug of
hot cocoa in the morning. Yes, it is
sort of sacrilegious here to prefer hot cocoa to tea, but people have
graciously overlooked that deficiency of mine.
With the cold nights, it’s tempting to do what David did
last Sunday morning. It was cold, so he
put on his fleece lined jeans with his pajama pants underneath as another layer
to keep warm. But then fast forward to
noon, and it’s 75°F and sunny, and David was melting. Most days the high is in the low to mid 70s
and sunny. On Saturday, Timothy was
wearing his winter hat around the house in the morning. He left it on when we went to a kids club in
Sweetwaters (the poor and black part of town…more later on Sweetwaters) and insisted on
keeping the hat on when it was about 65°F out and he was running around. So he stuck out from the crowd, being the 1)
only white kid besides Matthew who 2) has a way serious winter hat and 3) doesn’t know when to
take it off. *shrugs* A side
note, but at this kids club in Sweetwaters I was witness to games of netball,
soccer, and floor hockey all being played on
the same field at the same time. There
was just one small dirt patch available in between a parking lot and a
cliff/dropoff, so everyone just all played around and on top of each
other. Chaos reigned, and much fun was
had.
People have asked us why we would come visit South Africa
during their winter. Most South Africans would prefer
to be in the Northern Hemisphere enjoying summer right now, so that makes us a little
crazy. But David and I are odd
ducks. (Apologies to our kids who did not get a say in when we came here.) We prefer cold nights and warm
days like it is now over the crazy hot (90°F+) it gets here during the summer. So, yes, we are at peace with the fact that
we are missing a summer in 2014. We will
have 21 months of essentially no summer.
Although there are things we miss for sure, this is okay by us.
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