Heating

Europeans have a phobia about air conditioning. It was one of the more amusing things when I first discovered it, I was talking at the Goethe Institut in Berlin with a bunch of Spanish women at the time and the topic came up and I started to say how good air conditioning was (it was 30 degrees + in Berlin at the time) when they all started to say that it was bad and caused all kinds of health conditions. Now anyone that has been to Australia will attest that most Australians live in air conditioning, especially at the work place, so to have these Spaniards (and shortly thereafter almost every european within hearing joined in on the argument) say that it was very bad for you caused me to break out in laughter. Now the fact may be that air conditioning isn't GOOD for your health but to say that it is bad strikes me as being irrational, after all I have never heard of anyone getting sick from air conditioning, sure the very occasional case of legionaires disease, and the more common shock of entering a cool room after being outside in the blazing Australian sun, but never anyone having serious issues, and certainly I myself had never been sick from Air conditioning. Anyway that was my first discussion about heating in Europe.

Having just got back from Prague this all came back to my mind because I have spent the last few days in such excessively overheated environments that I am now wondering if Europeans don't have any ability to regulate their own body temperature at all or, that they are all living in the past when Europe was actually cold and they needed that level of heating, and now, although they quite clearly don't, no one has bothered to play with the automated heating in the last 20 years and they continue to just heat everything to baking temperature. For the entire time I was in Prague it didn't get below 13 or so degrees. This is not what I call a "cold" temperature, in fact during most days it sat at around 18 degrees, which is mild by anyones standards. Yet despite this fact every single place you walk into has the heating on full ball, at one shop where I could see the thermeter it was over 26 degrees! This problem is just compounded if it ever does actually get a little cold. At one point in my old workplace it was 8 degrees outside and 29 inside! Now try to tell me that such huge differences in temperature is good for you, or that you can even work in such hot tubs! This all ties into my theory that Europe just doesn't have the cold weather that it used to do (eg winters during WWII) but that the people still think its a transient thing.