Scared of winter

Shenyang is cold. Ridiculously cold. Turns out learning that Shenyang is the same latitude as Grand Rapids, MI (where I did my undergraduate studies) was not a beneficial thing for my mental preparation for winter.  Shenyang is much colder than Grand Rapids. 

 

For starters, I probably wore long underwear in Grand Rapids four or five times a winter... and those four or five times corresponded exactly with the four or five times I went out for extended periods of time to go ice skating or sledding.  (Sure, I went sledding more than that.  But I didn't always wear the long underwear when I went.)  Shenyang?  I tried to wait as long as possible before putting on the long underwear... and I got all the way to the second week of October.  Seriously.  Don't think I've been wearing it every day since, because I certainly haven't, but by now I'm wearing it for at least part of most days.  Today I even thought about wearing two pairs at once.  I'm going to hold off on that as long as possible, but I'm sure it's going to happen before the winter passes.

 

Secondly, coats.  I bought a nice black pea coat in GR my first year there, for all of $9.  (What a great purchase, by the way... nine bucks for five winters?  Can't beat that!)  Although I had another coat in GR, I managed most of the time with just the pea coat.  And in DC this past year?  I never wore another one.  But I can't even count the number of people in Shenyang who have looked at this pea coat with astonishment, greatly concerned that I might think I could possibly get away with this coat for the winter.  Many have said it is already not enough for me, that I should be wearing a warmer coat.  Note to self: go to the market sometime this week to pick up a warmer coat.

 

I have this marvelous perk on my cell phone right now (one of those 3 month free trials that tries to get you hooked so that you start paying for the service after that).  Every day or two I get the weather report via text message. Granted, it's all written in Chinese, but impressively I can actually read the weather report without a problem.  At least as long as there's nothing totally bizarre in it.  So the message this afternoon says that tomorrow's high will be -5 C and the low will be -15.  (For you Fahrenheit fans out there, that comes out to a range of +5 to +23. That's chilly.) Yikes.  But what's even scarier than those numbers is the realization that until 24 hours ago, we were hardly hitting temperatures below freezing... and I was already freezing back then! 

 

So the temperature by the numbers might not seem all that much different - at least so far - than winters in GR, but somehow the cold is much more chilling.  Three factors come to mind: First, I spend much more time outside here.  For example, when I have classes in the evenings, I walk half an hour to the school.  Which means I walk half an hour home at 9:00 at night, too.  Second, even inside is not very warm. There is technically something known as "heat" here, but if that makes you think of what we have in the U.S., you're wrong.  It helps, but not that much.  It's still quite chilly inside.  Thankfully, I have a south-facing window, which I think actually helps more than the heat.  Finally, every Shenyang person I've talked to about the cold has mentioned that the cold here is a very dry cold, which makes it feel so much worse.  It also makes my skin very dry...

 

So that's my thoughts on the cold in Shenyang, at least so far.  But I would be remiss if I did not tell you about what happened yesterday: it snowed!  Now don't get too excited; I didn't actually see snow falling from the sky.  However, I know it snowed.  Here's my story.

 

After fellowship yesterday evening, a friend and I went out to go bowling.  Bowling is a preferable sport in winter, in my opinion, because it's indoors.  So we were certainly cold as we arrived at the bowling alley, but when we entered the weather was quite clear.  Several hours later, as we walked out, we commented to each other that it must have rained since the ground was all wet.  Strange.  But it was not raining at that point in time, so we grabbed a taxi and headed off.  Ten minutes later, we both saw it: a car driving next to us covered in snow. "Where on earth did that car come from that it has snow on it?"  Yes, I really asked that question.  Perhaps even more embarrassingly, neither of us really thought anything of it except that it was bizarre.  Until we got off at Middle Street and started walking up to a restaurant for dinner.  The benches and signs dusted with snow there made us realize we had been totally wrong.  It had not rained at all, but it had snowed.

 

Seriously, a snow covered car did not give it away to me.  That's embarrassing.