Tuesday, February 14, 2012

How To Stay Warm In Cold Weather

I live in Morocco, which has been called "The Cold Country With The Hot Sun" and "The Coolest of the Hottest Countries." It gets hot here in the summer, but in many places in the country, especially, of course, at higher elevations, it gets cold in the winter.

I certainly don't live in the coldest part of Morocco. But it does get a little cold here.

I'm a bit more challenged by the cold here than I'd be by the same level of cold in the U.S. In the states, I'd just go inside and turn on the heat. While I have a heat fan in my apartment, the last time I tried to use it, a little over a year ago, I blew a fuse, as I mentioned in my January 2011 blog post entitled "Lights Out." Furthermore, the fuse box is in my neighbor's apartment. Given that I don't always know when he's going to be traveling, I don't use the heat fan.

Thus I resort to other methods to stay warm, including drinking hot beverages. Recently I've been enjoying some Hot Love. It's German-made raspberry vanilla flavored tea, with a brand name of "Hot Love." I also thoroughly enjoyed some hot cocoa, using a tin of cocoa I received as a Christmas gift at the end of last year.

More commonly, though, I benefit from the oldest way of staying warm: I sit in the sun. I'm fortunate enough to have a roof on my apartment building on which I can sit in relative privacy. I go up there and read for hours at a time in the afternoons.

It's much more comfortable up there during the day than it is in my apartment. Around the clock it's been around 50° Fahrenheit in my apartment. Last month, it got down to 47.5° in the apartment. At night I sleep under three heavy blankets, in multiple layers of clothing both above and below the waist, while also wearing a winter hat and scarf. That way, I'm warm when I sleep.

I've also taken to growing more facial hair during the winter here. While generally I prefer to have less, rather than more, facial hair, for much of this winter, I've been sporting a beard, mostly to help me keep warm during the colder weather.

I often feel fortunate when I consider that there are PCVs living in even colder locations than me, including in Morocco. Here in Morocco, it snows in Azrou and Ifrane, and on many mountains. While I can't see any snow-covered mountains from the town in which I live, often when I leave town in the winter, within an hour I can see snow-capped mountains in the distance, reminding me that, while I may think it's cold, it's even colder elsewhere, including not even that far away.

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