On Top of the World

Due to a string of coincidences and happenstance, northern hemisphere dwellers are in charge of everything. They are right-side up, and we, in the southern hemisphere, are upside down. North is supposed to be cold, and south is supposed to be hot. A southern exposure in your house gives you warm afternoons. Christmas is cold, and with luck, snowy. July and August are broiling. October brings the turning of the foliage, and attendant leaf-peepers. Universally accepted, and always true. Except here.

Here, deep in the southern hemiphere, everything is backwards, confused, not quite right. Apparently, water swirls the wrong way down the drain. Certainly, my south-facing apartment does not get the warm afternoon sun, and as I sit here gaining on August, I can promise it is anything but broiling. A quick look at the weather reveals that today's low temperature will be 2 degrees celsius. Not 22, not 32, just 2.

Which is cold. Not a little cold, not slightly cold. But cold. Fire-up-your-heater, turn-on-your-electric-mattress-pad, heat-some-water-in-your-electric-tea-kettle cold. Except it's not really that cold; it's the lack of central heat, and the Chilean obsession with fresh air that makes it seem cold. Spend an hour (and countless pesos) heating up your apartment for when your friends come over and watch them look longingly at the window, hoping you will offer to open it. You see, they've dressed for the weather, and didn't expect your apartment to be (gasp!) temperate.

But back to the upside-down thing. I keep in touch with many northern-hemisphere dwellers. And I listen to the them prattle on in the middle of our coldest season about mosquitoes, endless buckets of sweat, and the occasional patch of poison ivy on the inner elbow that spread, and well, you know. No! I don't know. Because the countries are arranged on this kind of spherical thing, and you know how sometimes it is cold there, because of the oblique angle of the sun? Well, that happens here, too. But not at the same time.

You might think that I would be sad to be in cool when you are in warm. You would be wrong. I don't mind a cool July. Warm socks, lots of lemon verbena tea, cozy times chatting with friends. These are all good things. But for two years running now, I have been just disgusted by the onset of summer.

Now, a bit about our seasons. Santiago, Chile has four seasons, but they're not my four seasons. Mine are spring, summer, winter and fall. In my estimation, Santiago has spring, summer 1, summer 2 and fall. Summer 2 is when you are so sick of 32 degrees and sunny, but you still have three months to go. And therein lies the problem. The summer. It doesn't rain between November and April. By January I have resigned myself to being on the world's flipside, but at the very beginning of the season, I seem to get a summer-onset depression.

November is supposed to be cozy. Who wants to prepare a Thanksgiving feast in the heat? Who wants to break out the tanktops to fry latkes in the world's smallest kitchen? And the Santas are sweating in their plush shorts and robes, and the traditional Christmas-time drink, called colo de mono (literally: monkey's tail), is like kahlua and cream, drunk cold. Like so much of what's going on for me here in Chile, it's not inherently bad, it's just that in my subjective view, it's all wrong.

But the mountains are snowtopped here at the beginning of August, and the days are crisp and autumnal. You just have to flip the calendar pages around to convince yourself that it makes sense. Because for half of the world, it does.