It’s cold in São Paulo, but no one believes me

To calm all those who are about to tell me that winter in Canada involves the mercury plunging to minus forty or fifty, I will start off by saying that when we are talking about cold in São Paulo, it is absolutely nothing like winter in Canada. Of this, we can be sure. However … this does not mean that the temperature doesn’t dip down here.

I realise that I am not going to garner a lot of sympathy when I say that the temperatures this past week were well into the low teens. But … it’s a different kind of cold [we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?]. Here the cold is wet and humid and gets into your bones and because housing is not built to withstand any kind of cold, going inside to warm up is not always a successful strategy as the temperature inside is often barely more than the temperature outside. Now, I live in a pretty snazzy apartment where the doors and windows mostly close. I cannot imagine what life is like during the São Paulo winter -- when night temperatures can easily fall below 10°C -- for the millions of people who live in the poorly constructed favelas. To combat last night’s chill, I built a fire in my fireplace and curled up next to it with a good book. Not quite what we expected from Brazil!