Shanghai’s thermostat is completely out of wack!
Shanghai seems to be a city that’s internal thermostat is completely out of wack! Now how did I come to such a conclusion without being any kind of thermostat expert I hear you ask? Well it was pretty simple…
I stepped into a building, then another one and another as you just tend to do going about your daily life and every single time without fail I had an instant desire to want to strip off my clothes down to my underwear. WHY? Because every single building is just so damn HOT!
You see the people of Shanghai seems to be allergic to feeling comfortable temperature wise. In spring when it’s a pleasant 24 degrees they’re still rugged up wearing puffa jackets, in summer when it is sweltering hot instead of having the air conditioning set at a nice pleasant temperature it has to be blowing a freezing gale inside making you regret putting your puffa jacket away so early. And winter, well if you like me thought it would be a nice break from sweating like a pig then how wrong you were because in Shanghai apparently even in winter you MUST sweat!
Every winter morning before I leave for work I make sure to check the temperature so that I can wear an appropriately warm outfit. With some mornings as cold as -2 degrees that means wearing at least 5 layers of clothing but the moment I step into the metro station I immediately regret wearing so many clothes.
Every time I walk into the metro station I’m hit by an overwhelming wave of heat from the heaters that I’m sure are turned up to the maximum temperature. 10 minutes later when I exit the metro station back into -2 degrees I’m so shocked by the extreme change in temperature that my China cough riddled lungs can’t help but cough and splutter all over the sidewalk.
But it’s not just the metro stations that have the temperature ramped up, it seems that every building across the city from shopping malls to hotels have decided to prolong the hot 30 degree summer within their walls.
The fancy hotel that played host to my family on their Christmas trip to Shanghai had to have the most extreme heating I’ve come across in any building in Shanghai. In fact it was so hot that after just a few minutes of walking through the lobby and up 10 floors in the lift I was sweating, SWEATING IN WINTER after less then 5 minutes and I didn’t even do anything strenuous!
According to the thermostat on the wall the temperature was set at 30 degrees. My poor family were melting so much so that they turned off the heating in their room all together, after all on the 10th floor it couldn’t get that cold!
But apparently the Chinese AYI couldn’t handle cleaning the room in less then 30 degrees so upon every return to their room they were back to roasting in a 30 degree oven.
Since when was 30 degrees ever a comfortable temperature!
Why can’t Shanghai just set the thermostats to comfortable temperatures, why must it always be to the extreme! What’s wrong with comfortably warm or comfortably cool? Why must the air conditioning be turned up so high in summer that I need to rug up and why must the heating be so high in winter that I want to jump into an icy lake!
Shanghai PLEASE, turn down your heating, save some energy and stop making me sweat so unnaturally in winter!
Category: Rants
