Читать книгу Tina - My Best Friend - Christoph T. M. Krause - Страница 8

~ Holiday at Last ~

For many years I took exotic trips to Sri Lanka.

As soon as you get off the plane and arrive on the runway via the gangway, you are overwhelmed by the humid climate of this beautiful fairyland called Ceylon.

Mystic and exotic like India, Sri Lanka, which is how it was named in 1972, is reminiscent of a drop located on the south coast of India. It is only about five degrees of latitude away from the equator.

In practical terms, this means that the seasons are not at all comparable to what they are like in Europe. There are only monsoon seasons that bring a lot of rain and non-monsoon seasons during which there are droughts, even though they are moist and humid.

“Rain” during monsoon season means, that the rain pours down from the sky like rivers, flooding everything that was not prepared for it.

Due to the sewage systems in towns and villages being broken most of the time and neither receiving maintenance nor repairs, ever since the British installed them, they can’t collect large quantities of water. This results in pedestrians often having to wade through knee-deep water in order to cross any regular road.

A region without any seasons means that you get to experience something fundamentally different than what the average Central European is used to.

We grew up with the temperatures as well as the brightness of the day changing constantly. In summer it gets light early and it gets dark late and it winter the opposite happens.

We require heating, in order to protect ourselves from the cold in our homes and we have known since we were children, that it is necessary to adapt our clothing to the temperature.

This experience almost seems to be “God-given” and irrefutable; ask yourself if you have ever wondered, whether this could be different, before you went to such countries.

Of course you know it and so do I. I’ve known it since Geography class in school. But experiencing it is an entirely different story.

Now you travel to Asia and wonder why the pavements get “folded up” at 6 pm in the evening (provided there are any!).

You wonder, why it gets light at 6 am and dark at 6 pm all year round, without any noticeable change or shift in the course of the year!

It was a cultural shock for me.

I once spent the night of Christmas Eve in a hotel pool right by the Indian ocean. It was about 30 degrees and in the background you could hear the song “Holy Night” in German. I have to say I truly felt as if I was in a film and a wrong one at that.

The temperature is essentially always the same, always around 30 degrees Celsius, all year long.

A Central European is not made for such conditions, even if he believes in it at first or longs for it in his dreams.

I, for one, found out that these experiences made me appreciate the different seasons. I enjoy them because they correspond with my nature.

Of course we don’t like the cold and wet days in autumn and winter at first, but as soon as we have experienced the opposite, even once in our lives, we start to think and feel differently.

However, that is something that everyone has to experience themselves.

I’m certain that there are people who deal well with it and therefore love it.