In Paris, I'm sitting at latitude 48 degrees, 50 minutes and 57 seconds north. For comparison, the only "major" cities in the U.S. that far north are Seattle, WA and Fargo, ND. Today (June 24), the sun rose at 5:48 AM and will set at 9:58 PM. That makes 16 hours and 10 minutes of daylight--or more than 17 hours of light using the conventions of "first light" and "last light."
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| May 16, 10:16 PM |
Having always lived in more southernly latitudes (from 40 degrees N in New York to 34 degrees N in Los Angeles), these long early-summer days are bizarre. There are lots of people out on the streets--but that's usually true everywhere in Paris, all the time. Streetlights don't really come on until very late, and you get a good view of the bats working the trees late into the night. The warmest part of the very warm days (30 celsius today, 85 Fahrenheit) comes at about 5 or 6 PM, so it's not as if the evenings offer much relief in terms of temperature.
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| June 9, 9:30 PM |
But even though sunset is only an hour and a half later than we would experience in San Francisco at the same time of year, it's still disorienting. Maybe it's because we have such a long, dark and cold winter here, with the sun going down before 5 PM in December and only about 8 hours of daylight through February.
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| May 25, 8:54 PM |
Given the choice between daylight hours in winter or summer, I'll definitely take the summer style. I just look forward to the day when Parisiens discover air conditioning. They will finally understand the true nature of happiness and it will cause them to lose their minds.
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| Strawberry moon, June 3, 10:22 PM. Still early for werewolves, though. |
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| May 28, 9:35 PM |
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