Winter in Brasil

I'm sure many people that read our blog think that it's always warm in Brasil and that we live near the beach or the Amazon or near the Christ statue in Rio. That's okay, we had the same misconceptions before we studied up on Brasil.

For many Brasilians it is warm year round or nearly year round. For many Brasilians they do live near the beach or the Amazon.

Not us.

We live in the southernmost state in the country. We live in the last big city you come to if you follow the map down the coast of Brasil.

We have four seasons and we have cold weather. Now before you think we get snow and temperatures in the teens let me stop you. If there is a forecast of snow in the mountains (about 2 hours away) people will leave our city and go there just to get a chance to see it. If you are a Brasilian and have never left the country there is a very small chance that you have seen snow. If you have, it's just the sprinkling kind that doesn't stick.

How can we say it gets cold here if it doesn't snow and the temperatures rarely get below freezing? Well, the walls of our house aren't insulated. It's just concrete (this is normal for all homes). We also don't have central heat. Only the rich have anything like central heat. We have floor heaters and window air units that shoot out heat. The problem with those things are if you run them too much your utility bill will be insane.

Last night was one of the coldest nights we've ever had in our 8 winters here. It was just under freezing. On nights like last night we leave the heaters on in the kids' rooms. The bigger kids (me and Benay in our bed and Ansley and Bronwyn in their bed) just snuggle up for warmth.

All day in our house today you could see your breath.

I must be becoming more Brasilian because I got excited this morning to see this:It's just a frost on the back window of our car but we'd never seen it here before.

Here is a close up of it:Like I said, it was exciting.

The freezing cold reminded Benay and myself of our first night in our new apartment here in 2002. We had just spent 3 weeks living in a hotel and we were dying to get out of there and excited to move into our "own" place. We had a great view of part of the city from our den window and I wanted to take advantage of it and sleep in front of the window. Our personal things that we had shipped to Brasil would not arrive here for another 3 months and we had not yet bought our beds to sleep on.

Claudio, the building supervisor and now our brother in Christ, brought us an adaptor so that we could plug up a little space heater in this big room.

I forgot to mention that I left our electric blankets in the hotel. A couple hours later we realized what I had done. Benay called the hotel and they had no recollection of ever seeing any blankets like that. Interesting. I was not high on Benay's best buddy list after losing those blankets.

Our first night in the apartment I somehow got so wrapped up in sleeping with a view that it did not register with me that our sleeping bags and air mattress in a big room with a very small space heater would not do a great job of keeping us warm. Benay went along with it anyway.

About 2 in the morning I awoke to my wife sucking the life out of me with her death body grip. She was trying to get every ounce of heat from my body.

She was also awake and as our teeth chattered we began to just crack up. Something about the whole, miserable situation just made us laugh like little kids.

There is something about winter here that makes this place special to us.

I confess I would love to have warmth year round. I would love to go to bed during the winter and not freeze. I would love to not need 7 warm days to get the cold out of your house after have a couple of cold days.

But, we would miss dressing warm and going into the mountains to our favorite restaurants and eating soup. We would miss seeing our breath (okay maybe not in our house). We would miss getting under blankets as we watch movies together.

I remember hearing from people, before we moved here, that Porto Alegre was the coldest place they had ever been. I thought they were nuts.

As my ice cold hands type these words you can believe I'm not laughing at them anymore.