Sydney, Australia, January, 2010
Wearing sunglasses and spouting sweat droplets, a bright yellow sun icon panted as it hovered over Adelaide, South Australia on the weather map. Accompanying the sun, a red numeral forty-three pulsated near one of the sweat drops. It was forty-three degrees Celsius to be precise.
“That sounds a bit high, doesn’t it, honey?” I asked my husband, Kurt, as we watched the weather report for Australia in our efficiently air-conditioned Manly Beach hotel room and spotted the high slated for Adelaide, the next day, January 13, the day we would arrive in the city that would be our home for the next year. The temperatures in Sydney for the past few days had been in the mid to high 20s Celsius.
“Yeah. That does seem pretty high,” Kurt turned down the volume on the TV and looked at me with a furrowed brow. “What is the conversion on that? What did that guy on the Manly ferry tell us? You double the number and add thirty?”
“That can’t be right,” I said, thinking back to an Australian man whom we had met on our way from Manly Beach to the Sydney Harbour. In addition to helpfully telling us how to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit, he told me he worked at a “flare” shop in Melbourne. It took me a minute, after marveling that an entire shop could be devoted to flares and perhaps it was a somewhat hazardous enterprise, to realize that the guy was really saying “flower shop.”
Libya. photo by Roberdan; http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=86186044&size=o
“That makes 43 degrees turn into,” I closed my eyes and did the math. “116 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s Libya we’re talking about or Death Valley,” I said while trying to shove newly purchased Aussie flag emblazoned souvenirs into our already overflowing suitcases.
Frankly, I was more concerned about how many pounds, or rather, kilos the suitcases weighed than the conversion to what seemed to be an impossible temperature. “It’s been so perfect here in Sydney. Does it even get that hot in Australia — except maybe in the Outback?”
Travel Oops 