Not Beating the Heat Wave

I think this heat wave is beginning to affect the Germans. The other day, on a crowded, stuffy bus, a man threw up between his legs at his seat and tried to act natural about it. It didn't work. I left the bus to escape its fresh barf smell and witnessed a homeless man jump in front of a hose, which a storeowner was using to water a tree along the sidewalk. The storeowner seemed, surprisingly, nonplussed.

It's the third or fourth week of the heat wave that's scorching northern Europe and it's starting to show. Businessmen in suits melt into their seats on the train, kindergarten teachers chase their young charges in slow motion, and city workers lean a little more heavily on their shovels.

This is a country that is not only completely unused to this heat, but completely unprepared for it. In Southern Ontario, I would've retreated to an air conditioned room with blackout curtains and stayed until September. Here, few have the luxury of air conditioning. Many apartments have wide windows that are great for letting the air flow through it, but not so good for summer heat waves were the temperature doesn't drift below 25 degrees some nights.

The trains, trams, and buses are no better. Most have small windows, designed to let a little air in, but are sealed shut to keep the spring-winter-autumn chill out. In this weather, they've been mobile saunas, 

Offices are not spared either. At Ogilvy, we used shutters to keep the sun out and windows to let the breeze in to avoid using the air conditioning, which was used so seldom that it was always set to Arctic and people would run to the thermostat and shut off the vent above their work station. When enough people did this, the air conditioning was pretty much turned off and we'd switch to shutters and windows again.

My office in Aachen also lacks air conditioning, so we're also relying on windows for a cool breeze, or at least a warm breeze, and shutters, which for some reason open suddenly for no reason other than to blind the workers inside with searing, hot sunlight. The heat in the office can be so debilitating that many of my colleagues avoid coming into the office and work from home, where they can at least stay cool and, if they're like me, work in basketball shorts and an undershirt.

When I do work from home, our apartment turns into a cool bunker. The shutters – first floor apartments in Germany have shutters over the windows, in case of burglars, peepers, and zombies – are shut and a fan is strategically set up.

Usually the German summer is a benign thing and the Germans partake in summer activities with typical efficiency. They patiently line up at ice cream shops, many stretching around the corner. On sunnier days, locals dash for the public parks, peeling off layers, while the rest of us are getting our shorts and miniskirts from storage. By the end of May, most of Germany is walking about, bronzed from laying in public parks under the sun, and happily eating their ice cream.

This summer is different. In the heat wave's first week, I'd see people who thought they could handle an afternoon of tanning in the park. They looked like they fell asleep in a brick kiln – bright red, visibly thirsty, stumbling to the shade. They still haven't quite discovered the North American cooling tactic: the movie theatre. We've watched a couple flicks and haven't had to fight a crowd to get good seats.

They have, however, gone running to the local lakes and pools. On Sunday, we went to a pool/strand in the Dorf's north end. Getting there was like crossing a desert. The grass is scorched brown and I was sure I saw a sun-bleached buffalo skull. Waiting on the platform to change trains was like looking through the haze in the Badlands. The train seemed like a mirage.

At the pool/strand, people laid towels on the burnt, brown grass or flocked to the shade under the trees and tents. But the water, with no clouds in the sky, was blue and cool. It was perfect, and you couldn't appreciate how great a swim that like that is unless you're coping with a heat wave in a country that is still learning how to handle heat waves.

The Badlands of the Dorf