Summer's over. At last!
Dubai has three sorts of weather – when it’s hot, when it’s damn hot, and when it’s Scandinavian sauna champions’ extreme endurance training hot. That’s summer.
Ah, summer. That long, lazy hiatus where we retreat indoors and draw the blinds, moving from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned mall with all the speed you can muster when it’s 40C and 90% humidity outside. What we refer to as a 3, 4 or 5 t-shirt day.
In a previous life. May used to mark the beginning of the barbecue season and nights that we could fool ourselves into thinking it was fun to sit outside, here May marks the end, the last rite of passage where we stand around wilting and pretend we’re still enjoying the clammy heat. Finally, defeat, and the welcome chill of AC.
And yet, summer must end some time. This year it happened around 10.30pm on Friday night.
For days, the humidity had been rising, and though the temperature was only in the high 30s C, it felt much worse. Walking anywhere was a challenge, washing would hang limp on the drier, damp for days. Even the birds were panting.
Normally, the end of summer is marked by two big sandstorms, which fill the air with choking dust and build sand dunes over parked cars – we have been waiting patiently for weeks for the first to arrive. But arrive it did. On Friday night, around half past ten. And suddenly it is a pleasure to sit in the garden again, humidity gone, and the air perfumed with jasmine, frangipane, hibiscus. Like some trogdolyte emerging into the sun, we took our first hesitant steps out from the cool safety of our house, knocked the dust off a garden chair, and sat with a glass of wine in hand, soaking in the sounds of night without soaking in sweat.
On such a night, a garden in Dubai is one of the most idyllic places on earth.
Ah, summer. That long, lazy hiatus where we retreat indoors and draw the blinds, moving from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned mall with all the speed you can muster when it’s 40C and 90% humidity outside. What we refer to as a 3, 4 or 5 t-shirt day.
In a previous life. May used to mark the beginning of the barbecue season and nights that we could fool ourselves into thinking it was fun to sit outside, here May marks the end, the last rite of passage where we stand around wilting and pretend we’re still enjoying the clammy heat. Finally, defeat, and the welcome chill of AC.
And yet, summer must end some time. This year it happened around 10.30pm on Friday night.
For days, the humidity had been rising, and though the temperature was only in the high 30s C, it felt much worse. Walking anywhere was a challenge, washing would hang limp on the drier, damp for days. Even the birds were panting.
Normally, the end of summer is marked by two big sandstorms, which fill the air with choking dust and build sand dunes over parked cars – we have been waiting patiently for weeks for the first to arrive. But arrive it did. On Friday night, around half past ten. And suddenly it is a pleasure to sit in the garden again, humidity gone, and the air perfumed with jasmine, frangipane, hibiscus. Like some trogdolyte emerging into the sun, we took our first hesitant steps out from the cool safety of our house, knocked the dust off a garden chair, and sat with a glass of wine in hand, soaking in the sounds of night without soaking in sweat.
On such a night, a garden in Dubai is one of the most idyllic places on earth.
posted by EyeOnDubai at 1:10 am
1 Comments:
EyeEye: how very very true. What a good post! I feel that I have spent the last three months inside staring outside as I would do in the winter in England but that now, finally, mercifully, we can start to venture out again.
Huzzah!
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