The weather here continues to blaze infernally by day and to settle uncomfortably into a still moist blanket at night. We again are thankful that we live in an age when air-conditioners are plentiful and efficient, and we're luxuriating in our time indoors, both at work and at home. The forecast for the week ahead is similarly awful, so we'll just soldier along a little longer.
The heat is really quite prodigious. We've been having exclusively cold showers for weeks, partly to try not to heat our body cores at all before we walk to school in all our finery. Cass seems better adapted with a glowing sheen the only sign of heat distress at the end of our 15-20 minute walking commute. I, on the other hand, find myself ruing shirt colour selections as the sweat soaks various areas in contact with the skin. My morning routine is to stand straddled above the air-conditioning vents at the back of my room for 5-10 minutes until the kids arrive!
We were very proud of a tiny achievement on Saturday. We managed to find our way across to a rarely visited section of the city to get a new air-conditioner remote after receiving a text of the address from a helpful Carrefour employee. The south-western sections of the city eventually develop into concrete jungles of cheaper and denser apartment blocks sandwiched between snaking overhead expressway systems with commuters hurtling towards the airport or the satellite suburbs further afield. We negotiated the first section of this expressway's eight lanes each way and variously guessed and intuited which of the many options we should take, all the while careening along on a protesting "Blackie"!
Spat out upon a slightly calmer thoroughfare, we were able to locate the Sampo service centre and a very helpful girl magically produced a replacement for our broken remote. All the addresses and instructions and conversing were relying on my increasingly rudimentary Chinese, hence the pride: strangely, I'm truly getting worse each day that passes! Job done, we negotiated our way back through the labyrinth and headed towards some mid-afternoon snacks in the form of the made-to-order gourmet burgers of Burger Rays. Looks like an interesting Italian place has sprung up next door during the summer too, so we'll check that out at some later date.
After already doing the bread shopping and the grocery shopping in the raging midday heat, we were satisfied with our forays outdoors. Time to watch the Wallabies get thrashed....but no! They actually produced a spirited fight in the Dunedin indoor stadium....we half expected a pitch invasion from Ross! We indulged in some shocking TV binge viewing on the weekend as well. During the course of the latter part of the week and through the weekend we caught up with all 6 episodes of the latest season of "Game of Thrones"....wow, what a trip! No spoilers in case you haven't watched but are intending to. Suffice to say, the series has lost none of its cachet: it might have gained some!
Photos are pretty sparse, with just a few enforced photos when I realized we wouldn't have any: I really need to just snap myself into action and develop some far better habits, perhaps by viewing things through a different filter. OK, I've descended into awful punnery, so I'll just shut the self timer and put the lens cap back on and have a good hard look at myself (a selfie?)!
(The last photo is the result of Cass changing out all the bags of desiccant in our wardrobes...they've changed from pellets to water over the summer!)