Change of seasons

Note to self – mark Nov 1 and May 1 on the calendar. These are the change of seasons in Abu Dhabi! From hot to incredibly hot!
When we arrived last August it was definitely incredibly hot. Temperatures are reported in celsius here, so hearing 35* or 40* didn’t really mean anything to me. We were watching TV stations from the States not local news channels, so we didn’t really know what the daily temperatures were. We just knew it was very hot! We would avoid going outside at all costs! We are lucky to have an underground parking garage in our building!
We kept asking “when does it cool down?”. Friends would always respond, “Usually by November.” November? Are you kidding? But sure enough by the first week in November you didn’t feel like you were walking into an oven when you would walk outside! And it remained lovely all winter long! Actually December was beautiful! We did receive a sprinkling of rain in January which was exciting!
Then all of a sudden just as we flipped the calendar over from April to May, the temperature shot up again! Oh no, it’s back!! By now I have grown accustom to celsius and know that anything over 35*c (which is 95*F) is very hot! The other day I was driving back home and the temperature gage in my car read 111*F!! I leaned forward and said to myself – that doesn’t really say 111 does it?!!! I’m not going to make it through the next month here!! Then today, I parked my car in the underground parking lot at one of the grocery stores I visit. This is great because I can go from my apartment, to our parking garage, to the grocery parking garage, to the grocery store, and back home without ever going outside! But when I got back into my car after shopping, the temperature gage read 103*F!! The car had been parked underground for half an hour and it was still over 100*!!!! This is crazy!!!
One would have thought that in the evenings it would cool down. “It’s a dry heat right?” “It’s a desert, it will cool down in the evenings like Las Vegas, right?”. Ah, actually, no. Abu Dhabi juts out into the Arabian Gulf and is entirely surrounded by water so it can be quite humid. I am finding the hardest part of adjusting to the weather, is that it doesn’t get much cooler in the evening. Leon explained it best – “When you walk outside you feel like a hot oven door has opened in your face.” If we are lucky there might be a slight breeze in the evening and one can enjoy a walk along the Corniche, but those days are dwindling! It was actually 100*F the other day at 6pm when I was driving my girls to dance class!  So we just adjust our lives a bit. We stay indoors as much as possible during the day and try to get out at night.
Crazy to think that I will be looking forward to summer in Florida where it rarely reaches 100*!! But on the other hand there aren’t any hurricanes or terential afternoon thunderstorms here in Abu Dhabi! And even the winter temperatures don’t dip below 65*F!!