Winter weather

It was snowing the other day, first of the year, which meant that everybody is updating their Facebook status. Most people were really excited, which is a general reaction to the first snowfall in a while, but I wonder how many of them have actually stepped outside. I'm no eskimo, but I know that this is not the good kind of snow. Its hitting the pavement and instantly turning into slush, and there seem to be scattered raindrops intermixed with the snow. Snow is fun, slush is terrible. That's basically defined my winters wherever I've gone. It does remind me how miserable winters back home could be, and though I'm very glad to have grown up where I've grown up and had seasons and blizzards, done some sanding and salting and all that, there were some bad times in there.

And for some reason I want more. This thought came into my head this summer when I visited DC for a weekend. Surprisingly, I hadn't actually been to DC in the summertime since a week in high school when I went on a service trip and sweated a small person off me. It was hot and I was intimidated., and seriously, when factoring in summer plans, the hot DC weather definitely came up. It's not fun coming back from a pickup ultimate game on the Mall to Georgetown sweating profusely. Looking back on it though, this was pretty absurd because there are so many places hotter than DC, and even Boston can be pretty comparable in the summertime. But anyways, as should be eminently obvious from this blog, I spent the previous summer in Beijing, which is as hot or hotter than DC, as well as some time in Hong Kong, which is definitely hotter and more humid. When I visited DC this summer, I didn't find it bad at all. It simply didn't feel hot at all, and maybe it wasn't, but some of my friends still complained about it. In addition, spending time in Ireland has made me much more comfortable with being out in the rain. There were definitely some rainy ultimate practices this fall where some people were very uneasy about going out and I was like, hah, this was every practice at UCD.

The point is that the ability to cope with weather is not instilled at birth, it can change over time. I actually wonder how much scientific research has been put to the matter: is it like learning languages, where my "native weather" will always be Boston and all subsequent weathers that I learn will be "second weathers?" Or is it much more fluid and adaptable and you can easily lose your "native weather" if you leave it for a while? I'm more inclined to believe the second one, because I hear of people growing up in the cold, moving to California, and then being wusses around the cold. Bill Simmons is a prime example.

So how great would it be to spend one winter somewhere freaking cold, and just never being scared of winters again? Here are my top few, with approximate latitudes, average coldest month temperatures, population and comments. As always, all sources Wikipedia:

(For comparison purposes)
Boston, United States
Latitude: 42
Population: 620,000
Avg Jan low temp: 22

Edmonton, Canada
Latitude: 53
Population: 730,000
Avg Jan low temp: 3

Ushuaia, Argentina
Latitude: 54
Population: 61,000
Avg Jul low temp: 28

Anchorage, United States
Latitude: 61
Population: 280,000
Avg Jan low temp: 9

Stockholm, Sweden
Latitude: 59
Population: 825,000
Avg Jan low temp: 23

Murmansk, Russia
Latitude: 68
Population: 336,000
Avg Jan low temp: 7

St. Petersburg, Russia
Latitude: 59
Population: 4,568,000
Avg Jan low temp: 16

Trondheim, Norway
Latitude: 63
Population: 260,000
Avg Jan low temp: 20

Rovaniemi, Finland
Latitude: 66
Population: 60,000
Avg Jan low temp: 7

Reykjavik, Iceland
Latitude: 64
Population: 120,000
Avg Jan low temp: 28

Harbin, China
Latitude: 45
Population: 4,750,000
Avg Jan low temp: -12

Tromso, Norway
Latitude: 69
Population: 64,000
Avg Jan low temp: 20

Ulan Batur
Latitude: 47
Population: 1,067,000
Avg Jan low temp: -20

This research actually really surprised me. So I actually looked up all these cities and they passed my test for livability, or at least visitability. I've discovered that cities tend to look a lot cooler on Wikipedia then they are in real life - thus if a city doesn't even look cool on Wikipedia, it's totally not worth visiting. Of these, Ushuaia seemed the lamest, but I wanted to include a southern hemisphere city, and this is the southernmost city in the world and pretty cold. Note that the artic circle is at about 66 degrees latitude north, so the midnight sun can be seen in Tromso, Murmansk and Rovaniemi. Latitude really doesn't seem to be such a good predictor for cold and I doubt many people would have guessed that Reykjavik would be the warmest city in this list, and certainly Harbin and Ulan Bator's ridiculous coldness is pretty surprising. Ulan Bator is the coldest national capital in the world and Harbin is known for its standard Mandarin and where a large Georgetown study abroad program is based which must be such a hard program. Also, I really first came across these cities as a result of a trivia question from Tombs: What is the most populous city north of the arctic circle? The answer, which no one got, was Murmansk.

So of these cities, I actually think most of them I would not want to live in. The ones that are cool, like Stockholm, isn't even colder than Boston. Murmansk looks to be a very industrial port city and would suck, Rovaniemi is really just a tourist town for its natural beauty, Anchorage might be cool but once housed Sarah Palin, and I don't plan on ever living in Canada. I guess Reykjavik, Tromso and Harbin are the ones that really seem pretty cool to me.