chilly

It’s chilly in Cairo. Yes, it does occasionally get that way here about this time of year. My small number of sweaters and jackets are now out.

No, of course it’s not that bad in the abstract. I grew up in a genuine cold climate, and know what that’s like. I remember my parents plugging in the car so that the battery wouldn’t die overnight. I remember pitchers of piping hot water being poured on car windshields in the morning so that we could be driven to school (God, it felt like that era would never end). And from pre-global warming days I even remember the blizzard of ’77 or ’78, whichever it was, when my brothers and I had to take a sled to the grocery store through snowdrifts and bring food back home that way. (We lived in an old farmhouse, well off of the main street, and our cars were regularly snowed in until the city/county plows deigned to come clear out the long gravel driveway for us.)

That said, places like Iowa are designed for cold weather. Everything is heated and insulated. Egypt is simply not built for cold weather, because that would be a waste of scarce resources: the winter isn’t really that bad, just a bit chilly. You’d never need an overcoat here; a jacket will always do. But it’s desert chill, all the way to the bone. And buildings such as the Humanities & Social Sciences Building (which I love) at the new AUC campus are designed with lots of open-air passageways throughout the building. And that makes it fairly cold on a windy day like this.