The heat/cold and hunger threads had me thinking about this again. Like many of you, I think, I've spent most of my life in a climate that's predominantly cool. I live too close to the sea and the blessed Golf Stream to get much extreme cold, but winters are long, dark and generally below freezing, and summers are cool with only short periods of really warm weather.

I've travelled a bit both as a child and as an adult, but it wasn't until I visited southern Thailand about 13 years ago that I really experienced a drastically different climate. The heat and humidity was so overpowering, every single day, and I was struck by several things. First how it affected my way of moving around outdoors. In Norway it's hardly ever too hot to move briskly and the sun is something to enjoy, in Thailand I had to resort to moving slowly and carefully and keeping to the shade as much as possible. I felt like a ponderous giant sloth, conserving energy as much as possible. Second how sunlight went from being this lovely, warm yellow thing to bask in, to being intense, white-hot and potentially dangerous. And thirdly I missed being cold. I missed the stimulating feeling of cool air on my skin and the energy it brings. And it struck me how people who live in very warm climates maybe never have experienced that feeling at all, ever, and I realized how terrifying extreme cold, the kind that makes your nostrils stick together when you breathe, must be to them. And they probably felt that we were "mad dogs and Englishmen" to want to lie out in the scorching sun...

Has anyone had similar experiences, where a change in climate has affected you more than you expected it to? I felt more than ever that cold is something you can cope with by eating well, dressing warmly and moving briskly, while heat is at some point hard to do anything about except flee into an air-conditioned room. But my whole pattern of behaviour is obviously built around a cold climate.