It is 38 degrees in Madrid today. That may not seem like a lot, but in Europe they measure temperature in Celsius. This scale was named after the Roman emperor Julius Celsius, who was brutally murdered after trying to introduce America to the metric system.
According to the Celsius scale, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. It has been adopted in Asia, Europe, Canada, Australia, Central and South America, and all of Africa, except Liberia. These simple minded foreigners fail to appreciate the elegance of a scale which starts (at 0 degrees) with the freezing point of an ammonium chloride solution, and fixes water’s boiling point at an intuitive 212 degrees.
I am a proud American, so when someone tells me, as I have just told you, that on this July day it is 38 degrees in Madrid, I immediately want to know the ACTUAL temperature. The actual temperature, which is to say the Fahrenheit temperature, is about 100 degrees.
Luckily I am not in Madrid. I am Alicante, which is on the Mediterranean coast, south of Valencia. Here the actual temperature is a little shy of 90 degrees. People in Arizona may think this sounds almost chilly, but ours is not a dry heat. The humidity consistently hovers around 65%. If sweating were a competitive sport, the athletes might spend July and August here.
My friends from the American Midwest will not be impressed. Summers there can be just as humid, and even hotter. But my point is not that Alicante residents are right to complain about summer heat. My point is that the Spanish people have done something about it. Something pretty cool.
Throughout the city one-way streets are divided by wide tree-lined parks, allowing pedestrians to walk in the shade. Some of these parks go for miles. Frequently there will be little swings or other entertainments for children, or perhaps chin-up bars or other exercise stations that are fun to admire as I leisurely walk past them.
Spain’s other heat-related innovation is called a “nap,” or as they say here, “siesta.” Every day at 2:00 p.m. most shops and government offices close so that workers can go home, eat lunch, and take a nap. Government employees, who probably arrived for work by 8:00 a.m., will not return to work, but after three hours most private enterprises have reopened. An evening doctor’s appointment is not uncommon.
Speaking of naps . . .