maxiewawa

This is a blog post. If you can’t see the photos, come to www.maxiewawa.com. If you can, obviously you’re already here!

Some Swedish friends were enjoying a drink in a Shanghai bar one chilly winter night with Aika and I. We were sitting under one of those outdoor heaters, and so most of us had removed our jackets, and had piled them on an empty chair. They were all thick winter jackets, and so the pile of clothes was quite high. Naturally, the topic of conversation got to the weather.

Someone, I think it was Gunnar from Stockholm, who asked me about Australian winters.

“Oh, they get pretty cold,” I said.

“Really?” asked Ada, also from Stockholm. “How cold?”

“Well, when it gets really chilly, and I mean, REALLY cold,  it can get down to as low as fifteen degrees celsius.” I said. “And sometimes even colder.”

Both Ada and Gunnar, who were born and raised in Sweden, laughed heartily.

“No, really!” I said defensively. “Sometimes you even have to wear a sweater!”

“Cold” is something that we don’t have much understanding of here in Australia. Case in point: yesterday, July the fifth. If you didn’t know, July is the middle of winter in Australia. And what do we do in Australia in winter? Why, the same thing we do the rest of the time! Have a barbecue. We just put on a sweater (or “jumper”, as we call them).

Here’s a photo of Peter. It’s Peter’s house we were at. Thanks for having us. That’s the pool in the background. We weren’t able to swim in it though; another disadvantage of being in the middle of winter. Notice the short sleeves!

Big Max and Udo. Udo has recently come back from Alaska and Northern Canada, where it snows even in winter. Seems a little back to front: there we were having a BBQ in the middle of winter, and hearing about a place where there’s snow on the ground, even in the middle of summer.

Here’s Aika. Just before we took this photo we were saying how our friends in Shanghai wouldn’t believe that we were having an outdoor lunch in the middle of winter, which is how I got the idea for this blog post. Hope you like it!