Baby, It’s Cold Outside
A Seattle native feeling at home in the cold and gray? Groundbreaking.
I dug way back in the archive for this article. It was the first one I ever posted after arriving in Chile in July 2015, back when I was innocent to the grueling heat of Santiago summers. After three years living there, I can say confidently: Santiago is very much NOT like Seattle. But it’s still home to me.
Before the wrenching drought that gripped Chile’s Central Region from 2017–2020, Santiago still had its fair share of gray days. Since I moved back there, we had almost none. To be fair, I tend to spend the worst of the winter (June-August) in Ecuador so I have avoided the bone-chilling experience of living alongside the Andes in winter with no central heating since I studied abroad. But these gray, drizzly days that feel so familiar to the Seattle native in me had all but disappeared until this year, when ground-quenching industry (read: mining and agriculture) slowed due to the pandemic.
I had been in Chile for just over 24 hours when I wrote this piece, snuggled into a hotel room that — little did I know at the time — overlooked my future office at Magma Partners. At the time, I was anxious about meeting my host family and constantly wondered how people could speak Spanish so fast.
I barely edited this piece before transferring it here because it so genuinely describes how a scared, intrepid young me was seeing the world and looking for familiarity in a place so far from home. Perhaps we all do this, finding comfort in the tiny things that seem to make sense.
Since 2015, I’ve found out there are many more cities with gray, cloudy climes, including Santiago’s sister city, Valparaiso, which is much more similar to Seattle or San Francisco than its inland, Mediterranean sibling. Purposefully, I wanted to share 19-year-old Sophia’s naivete to remind myself — and others — of the tottering process that is learning about the world. We barely even know what we don’t know.
I have this theory that the paltry number of cities with the same climate as Seattle will all feel like home to me in some way. I have a crush on Cape Town. I see myself moving to Vancouver BC someday. San Francisco is Seattle’s older, wiser sister. Santiago was the last unvisited “Seattle-like” city.
Clearly, I’m enamored with the city I grew up in, and distance has only made the heart grow fonder.
That being said, despite the shock of going from July midsummer to midwinter, the 45-degree, gray, overcast, chilly, and altogether summerless day today helped explain yesterday’s lack of fear. I’m not home, but I’m at a relative’s place. It’s comforting but not comfortable.
Most homes and buildings in Chile do not have central heating, so I’m wrapped up in scarves and hats and socks just to get warm enough to sleep. Even if the cold feels normal, its constancy gets under my skin. It will take me a few days to adjust to waking up long before the sun, but the grayness and dreariness that depresses some of my peers only helps muffle my shock of moving from the end of one hemisphere to the end of another.
DC weather numbed me to the enjoyment of seasons. It seems to skip from backbreaking humidity and heat to biting wind and cold without a transition season to speak of. After a couple of rough East Coast winters, I’m ready for the damp chill of temperate climates.
Santiago winter, despite digging its way through my scarf and hat today, has made it easier for me to accept that I’ll be living here for a year. I never realized how important weather was to me until I moved away from the almost shockingly temperate climate of Seattle. The comfort of the slight chill (despite the obvious DIScomfort of a slight chill) makes me feel a little closer to home than the 6,444 miles I crossed to get here. In short, I was right. Santiago does belong in my magical little list of Seattle cities.
At the end of my first 24 hours here, I had little to say about what I’ve done and seen. I’ve eaten more meat in 24 hours than ever before in my life. I’ve already dozed off in a classroom. I’ve sipped my first pisco sour. I’ve tried my hand at Chilean slang. And I’ve been a little chilly.
