Cold

I've been to a few different cold places

Sweden is not warm in winter but it's very different depending on where you are; in the South where I've lived all my life it's cold went and windy (around 0 and as low as -10 centigrade not exactly humid but rainy or melted snowy, in the middle like Uppsala where some of my friends study it is more proper cold with snow and dry weather (I guess -5 to -10 centigrade and in the north it is very cold and very dry (I'm guess around -10 to -20 and as low as -30 centigrade or even lower at times). I've stayed out camping in a lean-to in -4 degrees in a thin sleeping bag in South Sweden, slept in the Ice Hotel in the most northern part of North Sweden and played around outdoors all day long and all year around when I was in army service.

In Hong Kong in January it is not exactly cold compared to Sweden but it's still cold, it has a cold feeling (around 10 centigrade at the lowest) and here in Chengdu it is as cold as in South Sweden, which I find rather strange since it is at a Latitude with Cairo (in Egypt) and Northern parts of Mexico, but I guess it's the inland climate and the basin that does it.

What I do get about all these places is that how ever warm or cold it actually is it is always a problem when it gets colder than it usually is it will feel really really cold, it has nothing to do with what people are used to, I was cold in the Hong Kong winter and it was actually not so bad in Kiruna. The thing is how it is treated, Hong Kong is warm 11 months out of 12 and Kiruna is freakishly cold for half a year, so in Hong Kong they don't have facilities to handle even the soft cold of 10 centigrade whereas in Kiruna they treat -30 as something regular.

Here in Chengdu this goes to an extreme though, it is basically cold for 6 months and it is close to zero for about 2 months and it is wet, humid, rainy and feeling very very cold. Still they don't have any kind of insulation and the windows might as well be non exiting for all the warmth they keep in, this is actually bad in summer too when it's extremely hot instead. My electricity bill last month was 600 yuan, this is for 30sqm apartment without kitchen (even though I do cook at home sometimes) and an electricity cost of 0,51 yuan per kWh, that is twice the electricity usage Kei and I had in our 87sqm apartment with three TV sets and two big computers basically on constantly and a big kitchen that we used every day...