Loction, location, location...

I’m sitting here in the sultry summer evening heat grateful for the gradual and yet wonderful relief of the day cooling off. WHAT??? I hear you all shriek; the woman who has long vowed she never wants to see another winter again is complaining about the heat…in EUROPE??
Well, yes, but to be fair it has been ridiculously hot here. When we arrived last week, our plane touched down in Amsterdam to a frigid 13 degrees with soaking rains and leaden skies. The kids shivered their way to the waiting taxi, then shivered all night in bed despite the central heating being cranked up to 25 degrees. Welcome to summer in Holland. Yet within 48 hours the tables had turned and it was a sweltering 30 degrees with humidity which must have been in the high 80s. Now I know that’s normal in Singapore, and we are acclimatised to those temperatures, but the difference is that at night you can retreat to your condo and turn on the air-con. Here there’s no such luxury. Bedrooms heated to sauna equivalent remain that way until the sun rises and then heats them even further the next morning. And the sun doesn’t hold it’s regular 7:30 rise, 7:30 set pattern we’ve become accustomed to in the tropics; it hangs, bloated and sweating, in the stale over-heated haze until 10 pm before deigning to finally slouch its way below the horizon, only to leap back to bake the bricks again at 5:30 am. Acclimatising. It takes time. In the last month the kids and I have lived in three time zones and three different climates - New Zealand, Singapore, and Holland – and obviously it’s taking its toll. At least on me. I love the long dusks and early dawns, I just can’t get over the tiredness to enjoy it yet. The mother of one of my friends spotted me in the supermarket a couple of days ago but didn’t dare come to say hello because I looked too stressed and the kids were playing hell in the isles. Coping? Like hell.