Weerdood

I just want to let you know ahead of time that I will probably die of pneumonia or something before I get home.

This will occur because of the peculiarly piercing quality of Dutch winter fog and because of the apparent Dutch inability to cope with it.  The last couple of days have been around freezing but what has made it particularly cold is the fog, which means that you spend all of your time walking through suspended clouds of little pellets of almost-ice.

What makes it so, so bad, though, is that Dutch folks have decided to keep all buildings--from shops, to classrooms, to public transport cars--at a ridiculously high temperature.  It isn't so bad during the off-hours, when it isn't too crowded, but during rush hour, crammed in with loads of Dutch folks in their giant, puffy winter jackets, some of whom smell rather strongly of cannabis, I start getting flash-backs to that one special Christmas shopping trip with Asa.  I can only imagine that the Dutch folk have decided to try to warm up the whole general vicinity by using every enclosed space to provide radiant heat.

The title of the post doesn't really mean anything but "weer" means "weather" and "dood" means "dead".  But the Dutch, like the Germans, have a propensity to smush words together that "seem to go together."  So I decided to make up a word that expresses the fact that I will die because of the drastic changes of temperature and I don't know what the Dutch words are for "excessively high indoor temperatures" or for "dramatic, repeated temperature fluctuation".