Ordinary Gweilo

This is like living in the UK!  Cold, windy, and wet.  It’s not supposed to be like this, is it?

I always thought that the deal with Hong Kong weather was that we have to endure a few hot and humid months in the summer (made bearable by aircon and swimming pools) and a few cold days in the winter – and then we could enjoy the rest of the year walking around in shirt sleeves (or, of course, ski gear and scarves from November onwards if you’re a local). 

Unusually, this year we seem to have had cold weather almost continuously for the last 5-6 weeks, and it’s always cold over the Lunar New Year so there’s at least one more week of this, and probably another month, before things return to normal.

It’s almost enough to make you want to move to Singapore, where the only thing that changes through the year is whether it rains in the middle of the afternoon or it doesn’t rain in the middle of the afternoon.  Cold weather is not something they do – what with being on the equator, and all that. 

Which reminds me of one of the more surreal discussions I had in a previous company – whether staff from the Singapore office should be granted a special allowance to buy cold weather clothes if they were sent to Beijing (and all points north).  Having meetings on subjects like that really is an excellent way of putting off doing any real work.

Personally, I’ve got over my earlier ‘denial’ phase when I insisted that it "isn’t cold really".  I still think that 20 degrees is pleasantly warm, but I have to accept that 12 degrees with a cold wind is anything but pleasant, so I do now have some warm clothes.  The problems are that whereas it’s easy to keep your home comfortably cool in the summer, the average Hong Kong apartment is much harder to keep warm in the winter, and (of course) those freezing cold buses and trains.  What’s that all about, then?