cacoëthes

I love you, AskMeFi

I've become quite the freqenter of Ask MetaFilter in the past couple of years. Not only is it an incredibly useful resource for finding all manners of information and answers to obscure enquiries (the tagline isn't "querying the hive mind" for nothing, after all), the questions people throw out there are often insightful, puzzling, entertaining, or inspiring.

Like today's discovery, which was an enquiry about what to pair with rosemary brownies.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a food snob, and even I haven't thought of spiking my brownies with rosemary. Not only did the question itself inspire the desire to run to the shop for ingredients, the suggested pairings--Lindeman's Cassis reduction, salted caramel ice cream, lavender whipped cream, olive oil ice cream--were enough to make me want to blow off school for the day and lock myself in the kitchen.

Golluming about town

Summer is rearing its ugly head in once again. The month of May hasn’t even ended yet, but the CNN weather report I watched a few mornings ago showed that Bucureşti was hotter than any other city in Europe, hotter than Istanbul, and hotter than Nairobi. I suppose I should be grateful I’m only dealing with the incipient cusp of the heat, instead of the full-blown misery that is Wallachia in the summer months.
I tried to do some wandering about town today; I haven’t explored Bucureşti very much in the few visits I’ve had here since arriving in Romania, usually because of the weather. The first time I was here was in July, which was unambiguously horrible; it was all I could do to step outside of my hotel room during daylight hours to buy a bottle of water and some food. Even the last visit, in April, had its devastatingly hot moments, and it’s been in the upper twenties every day since I’ve arrived for my most recent round of medical ministrations.

This, it seems, is another one of those ways that I’m alienated from large swaths of humanity. For as long as I can remember I’ve been a sun-hater, dreading the heat and humidity and glaring, omnipresent yellow eye of the Sky Demon. When other people are basking in the stimulating rays, recharging from the vitamin D and working on their tans, I’m cringing from the light and hiding in any available patch of shade, even if it’s just the sliver thrown by the lamppost as I wait for the walk signal to change. I’ve developed an uncanny ability to locate and track the shade wherever I go, clinging to the walls of buildings, hiding under the canopy of the trees until the last possible second before crossing the street, walking in the grass instead of the sidewalk to achieve maximum benefit from the leafy protection overhead. Whether we walk on the sunny or shady side of the street is a subject that has spawned arguments between friends and I, and on at least one occasion, caused us to walk on opposite sides of the street when neither was willing to relent.

Walking about Bucureşti the past few days has, at times, brought back not entirely pleasant memories of the time I spent in Arizona before coming here. There are a lot of small, more residential streets here, but there are a lot of big, wide boulevards with nary a tree or overhanging balcony in sight, and no respite from the sun pounding down upon you as you walk ... miserably reminiscent of the desert environment that is equally ill-adapted to foot travel, where the only ambient shade one can hope for is the odd lone palm tree along the road, and where every daylight hour feels like high noon. I went down to the mall here earlier today for a latte and a browse through the used travel guides, and the majority of my walk there (up a WIDE, east-west boulevard) felt like a stint in a Cormac McCarthy novel; the unrelenting sun beating mercilessly on my face and arms, the sweat springing out in my hairline, upper lip, armpits, small of the back, feeling the rays penetrating my skin, cooking it from the inside out. The only options available are to either stay indoors between about 11am and 6pm, or to dip myself in sunblock up to the eyeballs and brave the outdoor misery. Despite their unparalleled hideousness, I've almost reached the point where I'm willing to wear one of those floppy grandma sunhats when I step outside, or covering up in long sleeves and gauzy scarves on the hottest and brightest of summer days. I let out a wistful sigh when I see Muslim women walking about, dressed in such a way that just their face is exposed. If I could stand being that pretentious, I'd totally go around town with a parasol.

I also seem to be one of the extreme minorities who finds sunlight to actually be depressing. Warm, bright morning light streaming through a window seems like one of those universally agreed-upon pleasant images; comforting and enjoyable, calling to mind lazy Sunday mornings and summer holidays. But I’ve always found that waking up to the rays of the morning sun is … soul-crushing. Terribly dramatic, yes, but I have yet to find a better phrase to describe the feeling that comes over me when I see the pattern of light travelling across the floor, up the wall, limning the furniture and bouncing rays off the metallic bits scattered about; something about it just makes me want to curl up on my side, stare at the wall, and pull a full-on Nietzsche for a few hours, contemplating the futility and pointlessness of existence. I’d love to figure out why this is; heavy curtains and non-east-facing windows means I don't have to experience this that often, but I do feel that it's an aberrant enough reaction that it might have been caused by some manner of formative experience. Maybe I associate the light with those Sunday mornings which seem to represent “borrowed time”—an ostensibly free day in which preparations still need to be made for the following week and Monday morning bears down with the inexorable constancy of an approaching natural disaster. Maybe it’s because I spent several of my childhood years getting up at horrifyingly early hours of the morning to go to figure skating practice, and mornings where I was actually awakened by sunlight were days that were in some way “wrong” or “off”. Perhaps I was frightened by a sunbeam as a child. Maybe it's as simple as "I like the dark". I really have no idea, which is disappointing as this is one of those questions I would really love to know the answer to.

So as a result, I’ve not spent much time in Bucureşti doing anything other than playing frogger with the sunlight--darting from point A to point B in the briefest amount of time possible. Going into stores and restaurants, visiting the (basement, air conditioned) PCV lounge, and staying in my hotel room whilst here. I’d love to be venturing out to the parks, historic districts, public buildings and museums and such, similar to the manner in which I spent my time while in Budapest. Except that this city is nowhere near as easy to navigate, it feels much bigger, and even though the evenings are still relatively cool I nevertheless find myself more apt to go the places I’m comfortable and familiar with. For whatever reason, I don’t seem as motivated to explore all of Bucureşti as I am to finding places I like here and frequenting them.

The Devil's beatin' his wife

I remember hearing, during my time in New Orleans, that this was a uniquely Southern American way of describing rain through sunlight (or, if you prefer, sunlight through rain). I've not yet been able to find anyone who can tell me the origins of this particular phrase, though there seems to be a phrase in a surprisingly large number of languages to describe this phenomena. Romania's is "Ploaie cu soare. Mâine-i sărbătoare” or, roughly, “Rain with sun, tomorrow is a holiday”. I shouldn’t be surprised that there is a Romanian phrase for this as well, as it seems to happen with a decent level of frequency here.
Local weather has been pretty rainy recently. Normally I don't have a problem with rain, and often rather enjoy it, but this seems to be that Pacific Northwest-type rain as opposed to the Midwestern-type rain I grew up with and grew accustomed to. It rains, lightly and intermittently, over the course of a couple of days. Ongoing rainy weather doesn't really bother me either; I prefer cool, cloudy and overcast. But the constant, misty rain is rather more irritating, as if the weather just can't be bothered to make up its mind about what it wants to do.

I like decisive weather. At least once a year in Chicago we'd get a massive storm rolling through; you could feel the tension and electricity building up in the air for hours, sometimes days, beforehand. The weather would get hot and still, and everything seemed to be holding its breath in anticipation. The sky would fill with clouds the color of anodized aluminum, giant, distant rumbles would shake the air, and the wind would pick up and start whipping through the trees. Cracks of thunder would fragment the sky and sheets of rain would start pouring down, practically out of nowhere. The temperature would drop 20°F in the space of a few minutes, and the ambient humidity would coalesce into bucket-sized drops plummeting down at 45-degree angles, hammering into the ground and ripping the leaves off the trees as they fell. Sometimes the lightning-pierced sky would turn a nascent, sickish sort of green and you knew you'd be in for a good storm, the kind of storm that leaves huge branches strewn around the neighbourhood the next morning. The house I grew up in had "Chicago style" windows--a large, stationary pane of solid glass flanked by two smaller, openable windows, and I'd pull the curtains open and spend the afternoon (this always seemed to happen around 4-5pm) watching the show.

Those types of rainstorms don't seem to exist here, at least not where I am--I'd assume that they’re a product of the flat plains that characterise the Midwestern region, just as the drippy wetness here is a result of being in a hilly, if not quite mountainous, region of Romania. So all day today the weather's been "indecisive" … sunny, then clouding over, then a few minutes of hard rain, then drizzle through the sun, then returning cloud cover, to clear and sunny, to more rain, to (today, at least) a short, unexpected bout of hail. I can't help but wish the weather would just make up its mind already; if it's going to rain, then rain hard and get it overwith. The constant dampness can get a little annoying, as can carrying an umbrella/hooded jacket just in case it turns rainy for fifteen minutes out of the day. That, and the fact that the broken sidewalks turn into mud pits, and rivers of horse dung run in the streets, so its increasingly difficult to walk anywhere without getting slimed with something.