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| Portrait of the Bloggeur as a Cold Man |
I grew up in Edmonton, so I grew up in the cold. The changing of the seasons there was brutal and unrelentingly regular. After 2 months of OK summer and 2 months of ever more depressing fall, winter and snow arrived by Halloween and then you lurched into Spring in late March. With winter comes the tools of survival and the usual travails. You froze your ass off. You hauled out your winter gear (parkas, long johns, snow pants, gloves, mittens for when it was too cold for gloves, toques, scarves of various lengths, and whatever else might be useful). You spent your time after school toboganning down ridiculous steep slopes on your trusty blue Krazy Karpet. You had your heart broken by the Oilers. It was winter: these things just always happened.
I left Edmonton when I was 18 and since then I have never really experienced a true, damn cold winter. Vancouver's winter features pounding rain and general, grey dreariness. Toronto has its cold moments (especially when the wind comes off the lake) but, in my one winter there, it was generally mild and tolerable. Melbourne's winters seem much colder than they actually are, especially if you are blessed with a cold house without any central heating (pretty much guaranteed if you want to live anywhere decent).
I have now found myself in a real winter for the first time since 2000. (I've been holding off on writing about the cold for awhile until UB had well and truly sunken into its deep Siberian chill.) It's now about minus 35 in the mornings climbing perhaps 15 or so degrees on a great day or 4 or 5 on a lacking one. And there's another 10 to 15 degrees to drop before we hit the bottom and the yak's heart freezes. I leave the apartment at sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 each morning, and head into the darkness and cold bundled up in all the winter essentials. The time just before sunrise seems to be one of the coldest times of the day. By the time I've walked to school in 20 minutes (see: above portrait), my beard is frosted over and logged with icicles, my thighs ache with cold (especially if I forgot the longjohns), my feet tingle with cold (probably because I wore my Fred Perry sneaks instead of my boots) and my will to power is nearly sapped.
It's funny what's comes back to you, as long repressed knowledge of living and walking in the cold flood your consciousness. What to wear. How to find the warmest routes. Your ingrained knowledge of when you're damn cold but ok and when you're damn cold and fucked. I've found it's all about knowing your limits and experiencing what's ok with your body and what's not in extreme climates. I often (over)hear Australians in town complaining about the amount of layers and clothes you have to wear and the time it take sto get ready to face the elements. But, then, I was a whinging mess of a man during my first few, sweat logged summers in Australia. Eventually, you learn what you can do and what you can't and you get on with your life.
UB's cold though is more extreme than Edmonton's for a couple reasons. First, the depth of Edmonton's winter doesn't compare. You get your minus 40 days here and there, but it doesn't stay down there for months on end. And, second, Edmonton doesn't have Ulaanbaatar's smoke problem, that makes it the second most polluted city in the world. One of UB's most striking features are its extensive ger (yurt) districts that comprise about half of the city's population (perhaps 500 to 600 thousand people). Each ger has its own stove for cooking and heating, but to make it warm enough to be livable, the gers are forced to burn all sorts of shit ... from dirty, lower than low grade coal to bricks to tires. The city's geography, nestled in a long valley ringed by high hills, means that the smoke doesn't have a chance to blow away, leaving an ever present haze of cough enducing coal smoke. It's interesting teaching the kids about urban development in IGCSE Geography because, reading the tests and homework, you'd think that ger produced smoke is the biggest issue facing the world right now. But, to these kids and anyone who lives in UB, the smoke is something that you experience everyday: it's ultra visible and damaging.
In a cosmic joke, the heating of Ulaanbaatar is worthy of an absurdist novel, designed and built as it was by the Soviets. Basically, almost every permanent building (excluding ger districts and some new developments) is heated centrally via a network of over and underground prehistoric looking pipes that carry steam and heat from various plants directly to your apartment (much heat is lost from origin to destination). For most people, you have no control over it. It's turned on in September and it's turned off in May. The intensity depends on the building with some receiving a paltry amount and others enduring furnace like heat. My building, probably due to how it was the apartment of the secret police, is definitely in the latter. The heat, especially in the bedroom, is so overbearing that we often need to open windows to regulate the heat (and let a lot of smoke in), sometimes for hours upon hours in the night. The only salvation from the heat comes from the smoke laden, minus 35 winter air.
