Saturday 8th August 2009 – A Hot Day

A great many buildings here have very ornate ceilings.  I had naturally assumed they were moulded plaster, but I'm told they're usually pressed tinplate.  It must have been a big business a century or more ago.  And it would have been quite skilful getting the standard sizes they must have come in to fit a room in a regular pattern.  I expect they do it in plastic now, if they do it at all.

 

It is getting much too hot.  Since everywhere is air-conditioned, it's hard to tell what the weather is like before I go out.  I have to go out before I go out, if you see what I mean.

This is the same latitude as Madrid and Rome, but I think the continental climate (rummaging about in distant memories of geography lessons) means it can get a lot hotter.  And it has today.

I still haven't mastered how to dress for this.  Basically, I want to go out in clothes that serve as factor-100 sun-screen.  But, eventually I have to step inside, and then I need my thermals.  I need to dress like an Arab outdoors, and an Eskimo indoors.

I think the ideal arrangement would be if bars and restaurants had a doorman operating a flexible tunnel, like they use to get on and off aeroplanes.  They could hold it against the car, and I could step from one controlled environment to another.

Since I spend more time indoors than out, I just accept being far too hot when I'm out, so that I can be comfortable when I'm in.

 

I managed to spend some time today with the bandleader from last night.  I was out organising my Mediterranean lifestyle, and it turned out he was doing the same.  They enjoy me sounding British, so I tried to dredge up the language of my old latin master, and asked him if he was carried shoulder-high from the scene of his triumph last night (my latin master spoke like that all the time).  "Of course, of course", he says, waving his arm graciously.  They had been kept at it till after one. 

          I have found another good local brewery.  It's only 'local' in the American sense that it's in the same state.  It's Millstream, from Amana, about a hundred and fifty miles north of here.  When I look it up later, I realise it's quite close to the 'historical' Glasgow I'm going to next, on the outskirts of Waterloo.

They don't keep it too cold, so I am soon wafted off to the Mediterranean.