The cool season will soon be behind us in Vietnam. Get ready to sweat

I feel as though the notion of acclimating to an area's climate is a bunch of nonsense and the only people that you ever hear talking about such nonsense are people that have never lived somewhere long enough to know whether it is nonsense or not.

I'm telling you now that living in a place for a certain amount of time and "getting used to the temperature" is nonsense.

I moved to a hot and tropical part of the world nearly 20 years ago and I am still one of the first people to overheat, one of the first people to break a sweat, one of the first people to start sweating uncontrollably and of course, one of the first people to complain about all of these things.

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Vietnam is dreadfully hot, especially in the months that most of the world considers to be the summer. June through August is nearly unbearable to be outdoors in unless you are soaking in some pool or the ocean and even then, I have been standing in a swimming pool and sweating, which is something I didn't really think was possible.

The best time of year to be in Vietnam is the part of the year that people here would refer to as winter, even though it is nothing like the winters that we would experience in the Western world. I live in Da Nang which is neither central nor northern, but is kind of something in-between. For a few months of the year we have what I consider to be some of the best weather in the world if it can manage to not rain.

From mid December to mid-to-late February, we have reasonably warm days and cool, sometimes even cold, nights. The rest of the year it is painstakingly hot and humid. Some people claim to like weather of this sort but if you have any sort of European or North American blood, there is a very good chance that you are going to end up like me, chasing air conditioning everywhere you go and basically avoiding being in the sun almost all the time.

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I'm not saying they are wrong because obviously they are not, but Vietnamese people are able to counteract this blistering heat with basically the same strategy they use when it is cold, but covering every patch of their bodies. This somehow works for them but in the hot months if I were to do the same thing I better be racing to the emergency room because I am quickly going to die of heat stroke.

January and February are my favorite months here because you can actually do stuff outdoors in the daytime and at night you can even get away with wearing a heavier shirt or in extreme situations, long sleeves. You don't realize how much you take things like this for granted until you can no longer do it anymore. Wearing jeans is something that I can only get away with for 6 weeks a year and I really end up looking forward to it.

However, I know that the end is coming soon for this notion because today at around noon I took my dog for a walk and was going to get some take away on the way back. It wasn't even a long walk, maybe around 1km or so - which is more than enough for a dog with 4 inch legs.

By the time I stopped at the place that I was getting my take away from I was already sweating a lot and I couldn't make it stop. Nobody has moved the fans to their outdoor seating yet because it isn't that time of year yet, but today, was the first day in about 40 that I felt uncomfortably hot. I was self-conscious about how much I was sweating and the marks on my shirt were becoming evident. I'm also a stress sweater, so the heat combined with the fact that I am now nervous about the fact that I am sweating just made me sweat even more. It's a terrible Catch-22 when this happens.

So if you are in the area and appreciate being able to do stuff outdoors without being in danger of heat-stress hospitalization, you better get out there and do it now. I am about to go on a run which will almost certainly be one of the last ones that I can pull off in 2023 without seriously overheating.