Cat on a hot tin roof – a brief story on a steaming relation with Paris.

Ah. Finally it came in handy, the Oxford handbook of expedition and wilderness medicine, which I brought with me a year ago to the utter wilderness of Paris. This morning, at 04:32, I flipped the pages to page 680, chapter 23: Hot environments – deserts and tropical forests.

Cause Paris is boiling. And my tin can excuse of an apartment is not helping. As the book says: Increasing summer temperatures in normally temperate areas, exacerbated by urban environments where buildings can store heat and so rise night-time temperatures by 5 degrees, are producing urban heat waves and deaths amongst the frail and elderly, Heat waves in Paris 2003 caused hundreds of deaths. On the streets, the signs call out for elderly to stay out of the sun and drink water.

I am not elderly, I am not fragile. But I am norwegian, and I just can’t get used to laying awake at night-time in massive heat&sweat. Nights like that turn the days into a blurry mix of fatigue and impressions, which, when we add on the fact that I am leaving in 3 days, is making my personality bordelineish, making my anger flare up faster than a french political scandal hits the medias (enough with the affairs!), and kind of making me put things on edge. I can check of several of signs of heat exhaustion (fatigue, weakness, headache, nausea,hysteria, anxiety, impaired judgement) in my handbook (it’s nice to blame something on something anyways), but it’s not only me. All over Paris the cars honk their horns louder and faster, women snarls at men who bump into them in the streets, the men shouting “ta gueule!!” in return.

So what to do.. Ah yes, page 692, I drink around 3 liters of water a day and I hang up newly washed wet&cold clothes in the apartment, to cool it of a bit. Then I curse Paris, join in the collectively increased frequency of utilization of the words putain merde,(flute and mince just won’t do) but I also excuse myself afterwards.

And then, luckily, there are several remedies in addition to a wet towel on the forehead. We have, like last night, chilling piqueniques at the foot of the Eiffel tower, we have air conditioned cinemas, we have americans climbing the roof of the next door building just to talk for a while in the wee small hours of the morning time, we have friends making you laugh, chilled rosé, little spots of shadow paradise in parks, where sleep can be found for some minutes.

And we have music to blast the room full of when the bags are being packed and the heat must be tolerated. And – we have the knowledge that tuesday night I will be in Drøbak, at the cottage, diving into the salty sea, listening to the crickets and for the first time in long time – sleep an undisturbed, full length night under the starry sky.