Hot Hot Hot

It’s gotten hot all of a sudden.  I swear, just a couple of weeks ago it was only in the high 70s/80s and I wanted a scarf at night, and then BAM! all of a sudden the week’s forecast looks like this. 

All week my students have been asking me if I think it’s hot.  I admit that yes, I’m a bit warm, usually while trying to shelter in the shade of the nearest wall, and they tell me no, THIS isn’t hot.  Wait until August.  THAT’S hot.  And then they laugh at me.

Assholes.

It’s amazing though, how fast the town has changed.  People don’t go outside during the day anymore.  Yesterday, I went to buy bread at 5:30 and the streets were almost completely deserted, but I can hear kids shouting and playing outside until midnight.  I’m spending a lot of time in my apartment because at least I can talk around in shorts and a tank top when I’m at home.  (It might be a million degrees outside, but I still have to wear a couple of layers to properly cover up.) Also, I keep having to turn my computer off in the middle of the day because I’m a little worried it might catch fire.

My neighbors have started sleeping on the roof (which led to a super awkward, scantily-clad late night encounter when I went to see why the lights in the hallway were on) and while I’m still sleeping in my apartment, I doubt I’ll last inside much longer.

(People back home keep asking me what I’m going to do about the heat this summer.  I tell them pray for death.  They think I’m joking.  I am not.)

The one plus to the hot weather is that all of a sudden cold bucket baths aren’t something I need to psych myself up for.  Despite never actually getting that cold outside, my apartment was a tiny little ice block all winter and there were days I would just shuffle around the house in my sleeping bag because it was too cold to face getting out.  I don’t have hot water (or a shower), so the odds of me getting naked long enough to actually wash my hair were non-existent, and I survived on by weekly trips to the hamam and just got really use to my hair being a grease slick.  And then my hair adjusted to only being washed once every week or so and turns out, all that crap about how your hair will adjust to less frequent washings is true, it just took a couple of really disgusting months for my hair to get with the program.

(True fact: I was searching through my emails for something and I found an email to a friend with the subject line So, I totally managed to bathe before it was two weeks!.  The entire first paragraph is about how my neighbors found me at the hamam and scrubbed my back for me.)

But now, thanks to the heat, all I have to do it stand outside for a few minutes, and a dumping a bucket of cold water on my head sounds pretty awesome.  Also, my pipes are exposed to the sun, so the water from my tap isn’t actually that cold anymore.  So yay, I might actually start bathing more than once a week.

(They said I’d learn things about myself in the Peace Corps.  I just didn’t realize it would be that I have no standards.)