Not been back for a week and they are already announcing snow for tomorrow…

I guess I could launch into my usual bitching about cold temperatures, poor standards of insulation in Japanese architecture and the fact that I can feel the wind blowing from one side of my appartment to the other, through closed windows…

See, that’s what I would have done a month ago.

But today I won’t.

Not only because I’ve just spent two weeks in Montreal, where -15° C is considered a warm day. But also because I have heard of Nunavut.

Nunavut is Canada’s newest province, carved out of what used to be the Northwest Territories until a few years ago. And it’s cold.

Last week, at breakfast, while drinking our morning bowl of anti-freeze (this is a Quebecer custom: not that you have to do it, but it’s the only way to ensure an emergency bathroom break in the wild doesn’t turn into an extremely painful experience), I asked M. if it could really go any lower up North, temperature-wise. She informed me that temperature in Nunavut routinely reaches -70º C (for all of you metric-impaired friends: that’s a shitload of negative fahrenheits). On cold days, a -100º C plus wind-chills.

Quite frankly, the fact that there are actually people living in these conditions is a testimony to the serious masochistic tendencies of mankind.

On the upside, noisy neighbours is not an issue there, since we got approximately 20,000 people living over a bit less than 2 million square km, or a density of 1 per 100 km²…
On the downside, finding a suitable mate for reproductive purpose must take quite a while…

Hardly a surprise, in these conditions, that the part of the population that is not busy getting high on snowmachine gaz, kills time playing the local version of ice hockey with baby seal’s skulls…

All that does little for E. here, who’s edging toward snow overdose and threatening to move to Yemen if she ever sees a snowflake again this year.