I
guess the storm is finally gone. For five or six days Lebanon has been in the
grip of a fierce blizzard that blew in from Russia, or at least that’s how the
newspapers describe it. The blizzards have all been happening up in the
mountains. Down here in Beirut we had five days of almost non-stop heavy rain,
winds that threatened to peel the paint off the buildings, and for five
memorable minutes a dump of hailstones the size of cherry pits.
The
storm wouldn’t have been a very big deal except for the fact, always huge and
significant but shrugged off by the people living here if you bring it up in
conversation, that there is no proper infrastructure in Lebanon. Under this
storm’s torrents of rain retaining walls popped out of place, roads flooded and
people found their shops and homes standing in water.
While
I cringed at the thought of how the Syrian refugees, stray cats and Lebanon’s
poorest were coping with the rain and bitter cold, I had my own domestic
distractions in the form of water leaks, power spikes and cuts, angry
downstairs neighbours (yes, the same malignant pair of pustules as have ever
plagued our existence) and cancelled school.
I
barely survived two weeks’ of the kids being at home over the holidays and when
this storm caused the Minister of Education to announce nation-wide school
closures, I slipped ever closer to the edge of the abyss. If you’re a mother
you won’t have to ask what abyss I’m talking about. You know. There aren’t
enough stale chocolate Santas on the Christmas tree to support me when the kids
start fighting solely as a means of passing time. The quality of the insults
reaches rock bottom and they start dredging up grade-4 favourites like “Poo
face” and “Fart breath”.
The
schools are supposed to reopen tomorrow. If you looked outside right now you
wouldn’t believe they could be closed today. The sun is shining in a blue sky
with fluffy white clouds prettily arrayed about. But it was a damp 14 degrees C
inside our bedroom when we got up this morning and for all the schools in
Lebanon without heating, that’s too cold.
It’s
hard to believe that they shut down all the schools in a country because the
mercury is dipping to five or 10 degrees C but that’s just my Canadian
perspective. They wouldn’t have many school days left in Alberta if they
followed such a protocol there, but that’s because they have insulated
buildings and central heating. Albertans don’t know about cold houses.
I
didn’t know about cold houses myself until I came to Lebanon. People used to
ask me – still ask me – how I could bear living in Canada when it’s “so cold”
there. I have never understood how to answer such a question. The first thing
that always comes to my mind but which I never say out loud on account of it
being a tad sarcastic and patronizing, is that while Canada is indeed a cold
place we don’t actually walk around outside in the winter in our underpants. We
put on warm clothing and we heat our cars and homes.
But,
see, this is the part that someone who has only ever lived in Lebanon doesn’t
understand. When you tell him that the houses in Canada are warm he can’t
really comprehend it. The reason he can’t, even if he is a clever man with an
admirable history of haggling prowess at the vegetable market, is that there
are no warm houses in Lebanon. You may as well ask him to imagine a cabbage
which preys on rabbits.
People
will argue that because Beirut normally only experiences the mildest cold
weather builders here don’t see a need to insulate homes. But that’s a
ridiculous defence because insulation works at keeping the air-conditioned air
inside during summer, too. Whatever reason people will give for homes here
being thermal disasters (other than the obvious and shameful truth of it being
the short-term cheapest way to build), no one can deny that they are
monstrously unpleasant in winter. On a sunny day – and Beirut has plenty of
those even in the dead of winter – the air outside your apartment feels much
warmer than inside.
The
rooms on the northern side of any building are the worst. Our salon and
Noonie’s bedroom are both on the northern side and they become meat lockers in
the winter months. I’ve been known to keep lettuce in our salon when my fridge
is too full.
It’s
to do with the humidity level of the air. It’s damp here so when its cold it
feels repulsively frigid, like a naked leap into a mountain pool. I know that a
lot of people living around the world are used to cool, damp climates and that
our few weeks of it here on the Mediterranean don’t count for much, but boy, I
just find it ironic that people ask me how I can stand the cold in Canada. I
never felt half as cold in Canada as I have here in Beirut.
People
in Lebanon expect to have to wear sweaters and jackets indoors in winter. Were
you aware of this? You go to some government office in Beirut on a December day
and the men and women sitting behind their desks are wearing wool coats with
scarves around their necks. You can practically see your breath inside their
offices but nobody bothers trying to heat the place because they know from
experience that the heat just drops out through the walls like water from a
sieve.
We
do have heaters in our apartment and we use them but you have to be sitting
right under them to feel their effect. The room almost never really heats up
and when it does it begins to ebb away the second you lower the heat down
again. You feel as if you are trying to heat up Beirut rather than the room you
are sitting in and before long you find yourself sighing and reaching for your
wool coat, too.
M
remembers his first winter in Canada. It was late December when he left Lebanon
and his mum sent him off with a suitcase stuffed with wool sweaters and not
much else. She thought his every moment of existence in that northern,
beaver-infested hinterland would be a battle against hypothermia. For the
journey itself she tucked him into three layers of wool (he was twenty-one
years old and should have been doing his own tucking but that tells you
something about Lebanese mothers and also a bit about why M was getting on an
airplane) and, if I’m not mistaken, two pairs of woollen trousers worn one on
top of the other.
Well,
M almost passed out when he got to his uncle’s place in Calgary. The uncle and
his wife picked M up at the airport and drove him back to their apartment which
they kept, in Canadian fashion, at a dry and toasty 23 degrees or so. M got in
the door and, never having experienced anything like good central heating,
began almost at once to overheat. His uncle thought he was sick. With flushed cheeks
and sweat running down his back M peeled off the layers until he reached his
t-shirt where he sensibly remained for the duration of his years in Canada. The
wool sweaters went in a box and were never worn again.
It
is funny, though, how people’s tolerance for heat and cold varies. I’ve
frequently mentioned M’s and my thermostat wars on this blog. Then there is M’s sister who can’t
bear the slightest cold and can generally be found from late October to
mid-April draped across a portable heater in her living room like a wet mitten
someone is trying to dry out. On the other end of the spectrum dwells our neighbour in Newfoundland who once told me that
while she liked the sun she didn’t care for too
much heat, and that “anything over 18 degrees” was getting a bit warm for
her liking.
Half
our family friends in Canada who are of retirement age head to Arizona or
Mexico for the winter but I met an Englishwoman once who told me that she and
her husband had lived in Canada for a couple of years, in southern Ontario, and
that while they enjoyed their time they eventually decided to leave “because of
the weather.” When I sympathised with her and said that the winters were hard
for those not used to them she said, “Winters? Oh, the winters were fine. It
was the summers we couldn’t bear. Too hot and humid even to sleep at night. We
couldn’t wait to get back to England.”
What
sense can we make of any of this? Why, none at all of course, just like this
blog post.