I’m laying on top of my bed with a wet rag on my head. The bed is stripped bare of anything but the mattress sheet, and we have a desk fan blowing on a frozen (not for long) 2-Liter bottle of water in a vain attempt to try to cool the room down. The windows and doors throughout the house are flung open, and thankfully, tonight, there is a light breeze, though not super refreshing given it is still 84° despite the late hour.

We are officially mid-heatwave in Germany. Five days into a streak of 92°+ highs, some days hitting 100°. There is no air conditioning, in our house or almost anywhere else. Heck, there aren’t even fans – ceiling or otherwise! Believe me, I’ve tried to find some. Last year in late summer, I went to the largest appliance store in the country and asked the nicest-looking employee where to find a fan. The woman looked at me, puzzled. “You want a fan? Like, maybe, a HEPA filter? For an air purifier?”

“Oh, sorry, no, I just wanted one of these, you know, like a room fan?” I show her a picture of a pedestal fan. She looked at me strangely, and just shook her head. So we settled for the desk fan from Amazon.de:

It seemed fine at the time, as we’d missed the worst of the heat here last year, but now it seems pretty pitiful.

The funny part is, the Germans aren’t even working on a solution to this. This is a country who produced the man who invented the modern refrigerator, good ol’ Carl Von Linde; clearly, German engineers are not strangers to cooling tech. However, it appears that extending the idea of cooling food to cooling humans was not a priority for Herr Linde – maybe the idea of sweating it out with a cold beer in hand was enough? Today, a Google search of ‘ways to beat the heat in Germany’ reveals tips & tricks like these:

• Sit in your basement
• Visit a local lake or pool
• Eat a lot of ice cream
• Lay wet rags on your body to fall asleep
• Take several cold showers a day
• Try not to do anything
• Keep all shutters closed between 8am and 8pm
• Open all house windows after 9pm and before 7am
• Do not go out between the hours of 11am and 8pm

In some ways, I understand it. We are probably, hopefully, only looking at 15-20 days of extremely hot weather in the course of a year. Air conditioning units are notoriously bad for the environment, they discourage the flow of fresh air through the house, and they make us all that much ‘softer’ and unable to deal with things that are uncomfortable. Most Germans would be hard-pressed to say which one of these circumstances is worse. What I really think it is, though, that Germans, like many Europeans, don’t have the ‘convenience’ bug that we have in the US. They’re much more likely than us to stand in long lines without losing their minds, rarely eat a meal out that doesn’t involve at least a 90-minute commitment, and live their entire lives with just one kind of Scotch tape vs. needing 15 varieties for all the different potential uses of Scotch tape. Perhaps AC is just another convenience – extravagant and wasteful – not to be bothered with?

To keep cool in mind if not in body, I love hearing stories of people as they deal with this extreme weather. A director at P&G is sleeping with wet towels on his ankles and says it’s working pretty well. On Matt’s videoconference yesterday, one of the guys was sporting a tank top. A scientist friend had to make only two trips up and down his stairs on Saturday before he gave up and decided to spend the rest of the day on the couch. A Hyundai family drives around in their Hyundai with the air conditioner on, in the name of research, of course. And we are doing our best with all of the things listed above, minus the driving around. Although, I will say that taking a cold shower is less energizing when you can actually feel the cold water turning warm as it flows from head to toe. I have even taken a liking to a mid-afternoon float in our delightful ‘storable pool’ – I’ll spare you the picture of me, though, in favor of these cuties:

We’re supposed to get a break in four days, when the temperature at night will go below 70° for the first time in a long time. It’s going to be pretty great. Until then, I’m thankful for the little things, like wet towels, a basement to reverse-hibernate in, and a husband who is willing to accept my rationale of ‘not heating up the kitchen’ as reason enough to order dinner out again tomorrow night.