By Aaron Spitzer
The world’s eyes are turned toward South Africa right now, where the World Cup of soccer is being played. And if the world’s eyes are looking closely, they’ll see something that might surprise them: In the stadiums of Africa’s southernmost nation, many of the fans – even the players – are wrapped in scarves and toques and gloves. It’s mid-winter in South Africa, and by all appearances it’s pretty chilly.
The world’s sports media have been buzzing about it. This past week at Mogwase Stadium in Rustenburg, a morning practice was cancelled because the pitch was iced up. At the Brazil-North Korea game in Durban, Brazil’s normally-scantily-clad fans shivered beneath blankets. Snow struck various parts of the nation for the first time in decades. According to news reports, 500 penguins actually froze.
To Northern Canadians, that country’s cold snap may not sound like much. After all, when Johannesburg’s mercury “plunged,” it only went down to minus-5 – a nice May day on Baffin Island. And South Africa’s all-time record low is only minus-19, which would be a warm winter temperature above the Arctic Circle.
But keep this in mind: In the Yukon, NWT and Nunavut, we have indoor heating. Whenever we’re inside, we can count on it being balmy T-shirt temperatures. And during the really cold periods, most of us, most of the time, are perfectly toasty indoors.
By and large, however, South Africans are not. One of Up Here’s former staffers is currently living in Lesotho, a kingdom within South Africa. Whenever we talk to her, she mentions how chilly it is – inside. Homes there, she explained, don’t have heat. She says she sleeps in a toque. “Every night it’s like camping,” she told me. Even the World Cup players, staying in the finest hotels in that nation, are in the same chilly predicament. There have been news reports that some of them have taken to going to bed with hot-water bottles beneath the blankets.
All of which is to say that maybe us Northerners aren’t such experts on cold after all. Our First World luxuries actually buffer us from the true chill of nature most of time. That ain’t so in South Africa, where, however low the mercury sags, you’re right there in it, all the time, feeling the cold’s sharp bite, 24-7, with no escape. Maybe they’re the real Northerners, hey?
