On the very last day of the trip, after we had all had our goodbye dinner, a group of about ten of us headed out to Wind and Mills one last time. Luckily my friend Oskar was there again! We met on one of the first nights of the trip at Wind and Mills and then saw each other maybe another three or four times. Oskar is nineteen, from Vienna, and works as a cook in a professional kitchen. We've talked about politics, German dialects, and the city of Steyr amongst other things. But what fascinated me the most was our last conversation which happened to be about air conditioning. At the end of thirty days of perpetual sweat in the humid summer air of Vienna, this look into his Viennese mind really explained a lot.
It began with him explaining to me his set up at work. He said he worked many hours in this small cramped space with two others and that during the summer days it got to at least 40 degrees Celsius in there. I immediately asked him why he didn't have some sort of air conditioning set up in there. Then he gave me this peculiar look. He said that they could have put one in but obviously it would not be smart to be sick while cooking. Then it was my turn to give him the peculiar look.
According to Oskar, and this is common knowledge for Austrians, moving cold air hitting you while you are hot will make you sick. Walking into a cold room, like a cellar, is completely different. Then you're okay. But if the cold air is moving over you then sickness is inevitable. He proceeds to list several specific occasions where cold air had passed over him while he was hot and then immediately started sneezing and getting a cold.
I explained to him that this is how the entirety of US copes with hot temperatures. We have air conditioning blasting through all our buildings and will direct the cold air directly at our faces if we're in the car and we're hot. It didn't matter though, we were both hilariously stuck in our own ideas about this and I wasn't going to argue biology with him in the middle of a bar.
But either way this explains why a developed country like Austria could be so horribly under prepared for hot temperatures in the minds of us Americans. The only air conditioning I experienced on the trip was in museums, and it was for the paintings not us! It's not like hot temperatures are a new phenomenon to Vienna, they just think they'll get sick if they use it.
At the end of the night I thanked Oskar for his companionship and wished him a good life going forward, seeing that I likely won't meet him again. He wished me a happy life. The whole affair made me a bit teary eyed.
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