The cold. The snow. The winter! MT, USA

Every so often I get home to visit the US.  More often than not, this happens to coincide with my least favorite season of the year: winter.  It's not that I really have anything against winter as a season, except that it's cold and snows constantly.  This year, I was unlucky enough to be visiting a friend of mine in Montana during this unfortunately non-tropical time of the year.

To be fair, I haven't always been a cold hater.  As a child, my parents used to think I was impermeable; I would run around in short dresses, sandals, and never a coat to be found.  In fact, I remember endless fights with my parents (then ultimately just my mother who insisted my lack of clothing made her cold).  Then puberty hit, and my nearly-naked winter romps came to an end as I developed inferior circulation and susceptibility to the cold.

Flash forward to today- after many years of living in the tropics, my body has become well adjusted to over 40 degrees C or 105 degrees F.  In fact, we rarely turn on the AC, even on the hottest summer days, and that can get up to 45 degrees C but feel hotter with the island's 110% humidity.  I like the heat, and I've grown accustomed to drinking copious amounts of water to stay hydrated, and generally sweating my butt off to stay cool.

Visiting the US in the winter then, is rather obviously not my cup of tea.  With wind chill, it's not unusual for it to feel like 15 below zero (F), and then of course there's the pesky snow.  Sure, it's beautiful at the beginning of the season when you still miss it from last season, but pretty soon everything has been white for weeks or even months and you feel like you're trapped in an asylum slowly going insane.

Now that it's officially spring, I can say that I have endured US winter and survived, though admittedly I have been rather cranky about the entire experience.  Even so, it has made one thing crystal clear: pursuing a job on the Arabian peninsula is the right decision.  Desert sands, palm trees, and warm breezes all year round; the only snow will be safely tucked away within an artificial ski dome, where it belongs!