Sizzling in Moscow

It's hot. Sizzling hot. Riding the bus, walking, taking the metro everywhere you see red faces and sweaty bodies fanning themselves from the heat. Muscovites aren't used to such scorching temeratures and melt when the temperature rises above 30 degrees celsius (86 farenheit).

I'm originally from Texas where the summer temperatures are normally over 100 degrees farenheit (38 degrees celsius) and are often even hotter than that so to be honest, Moscow doesn't seem that blazingly hot to me. Today the temperature was over 33 C and I even went jogging at noon. The park where I ran seemed empty, but it was an illusion because everyone was hiding under the trees and avoiding the hot sunny spots except for girls covering themselves in cooking oil and frying their skin to a crisp. I had always heard that this was a bad bad bad idea. In Texas, especially, where you can fry an egg on the pavement, you would be in for some very severe burns.

A lot of people think that Texas is a desert and so they imagine it being very hot and dry. However, I'm from East Texas which is a land of pine forests and lakes. The wind blows in from the Gulf of Mexico, however, and so it's also very humid. If you want to know what it feels like, it's very much like being in a Russian banya.

In the summer there are often heat waves where the temperature is higher than 38 C (100 F) even getting as high as 45 C. At such times, there are often droughts, periods where it doesn't rain for a long time and it's illegal to water your lawn at such times. You have to be careful not to spend too much times outdoors or you can have a heat stroke and end up in the hospital. Since it's so hot during the day, it doesn't cool down that much at night either. Fortunately, most people have air conditioning, and almost all businesses and stores have theirs running at full blast so it's like walking into a freezer. Many people only notice the heat during the walk from their air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned mall. As kids, though, we notice the heat more from playing outside all day and mowing the lawn in hundred degree weather.

All these memories make Moscow seem like a cool oasis in comparison were it not for the lack of air-conditioning. Yes, some lucky people have it, but for only one month or so of fairly hot weather it hardly seems worth it. Still, the nights these days are fairly hot and humid and I often wake up sweaty, sticky and uncomfortable. The only good thing is that we don't have hot water this month and cold showers and lots of cold beer help to keep cool.

vocabulary
----------------
scorching = burning
blazingly = blazing = bright and burning like a fire
sweaty = sweat = the liquid that comes out of you when it's hot.
humid = wet or moist. Used when talking about hot weather, especially
in the expression hot and humid
sizzling = the sound that food makes when you fry it on a hot pan.
heat wave = a period of very high temperatures
heat stroke = a condition when you can collapse or pass out from extreme heat
drought = a long period when there is no rain and it is very dry.