Ajooma

England is famous for many things. Ahead of the cultural curve (or so they think), strong financial market, soon host of the Olympics, hustle bustle town with something going on all the time. But a temperate climate is not one of them. Why pick on a negative when there are overwhelming positives abound? Because weather, the atmosphere around you is always there. It effects the people and the mind set from the time you get up to the moment you go to bed. Something so all encompassing is bound to shape the national personality in some way. So what’s the weather like here? Everyone knows it. It rains. Allot, and often. It’s never constant, though so one can get some nasty surprises while outside. To compare with Korea, I mapped the average rainfall throughout the year.

Although it seems obvious to me, with the spike in the summer to signify the monsoon, the red is Korea and blue is England. If you tallied the mms of rainwater, Korea gets more, but in concentrated amounts over a relatively short period, while it seems in rains every other day in England. The sloping line is deceptive, as the weather can be quite volatile, though in a narrow window. Once I’ve been through a cloudy day that turned into an outburst of sunshine, a torrent of rain, drizzle, and back to dark clouds all in one afternoon. This indecision on part of the weather is mirrored in the hemming and hawing of the English. I don’t think people are cold here, just confused.

Speaking of temperature, or lack of I tried mapping the high and lows of the day throughout the year as well.

Using the same colour markers as before, it’s plain to see that England is in fact milder. But I always feel colder here. I think it’s because the rain keeps everything damp. This is the kind of moisture that seeps into your bones. The winters are terrible, just warm enough not to snow, so you don’t even have the rewards for enduring the cold. Bookmakers regularly give odds for a white christmas, but I’ve never seen one my 3 years here.

But the summers are beautiful. Sometimes a week of straight sunny days. Unlike the humid and hot days of Korea, ideal for breeding mosquitoes, here the warm heat is cut through with cool breezes and big blue skies dotted with fluffy white clouds. They usually lat for 3 weeks though. But all the crap kinda makes up for it, when I’m walking about and everyone seems a bit friendlier, and I find myself greeting strangers. Well at least smiling at them. On one of those days, I was cloud spotting and found on shaped like the UK. What do you think?