When I started this blog my intention was to both stay connected with friends and family and share with everyone my experiences and thoughts from afar. I realized that although I have shared photos, recipes, books and other things I failed to share about the basic things that are part of my daily life. In my previous blog site about Denmark I had managed to share a bit more about these every day topic, which to me are dull and for lack of a better word boring, for family and friends it is knowing the details which makes them feel part of my daily life and therefore a little closer. I want to start a series of blogs called: FAQs. The idea is to talk about the topics that most people ask me about when I go home or give them a call. To begin this series, today I will talk a bit about the climate in Toronto.

With a population of 2.8 million people Toronto is the largest city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. Hard to imagine that so many people want to live in a city where the weather is unbearable, either we're all crazy or the weather is not as insane as people imagine it to be. Although there are a few crazies out there, the second option seems more realistic.

As I said in my blog about the weather in Denmark, it is difficult to define whether a place is cold or not given that each of us has a different internal thermometer. So again I have to share data and let everyone decide for themselves. Toronto has what meteorologists call a humid continental climate; this means that we can enjoy the four seasons. We have a warm summer with average temperatures between 73-88 °F. However, the high humidity range makes it so that the hottest hours of the day can reach temperatures between 95-99 °F. Despite being one of the warmest cities in Canada, the winters can be quite cold with temperatures often dropping to 14 °F, but the average winter daytime temperature is 31 °F and 20 °F at night. Of course on windy and cloudy days the wind chill is much lower and can reach -13 °F during the worst winters. During the spring, the average temperature is between 37 °F and 50 °F and during the fall between 45-57 °F.

Now, for some people colder months are brutal and this sounds like a miserable thing to face, but I personally enjoy them and embrace the winter wonderland with all it’s charms. The days that it snows I like to go for a walk or sit by the window and watch the snowfall. Despite seeing a lot of "snow" in my life, it still has a magical feel to it. On top of this, the city is well prepared for the cold. Taxi drivers are quite nice and still pick you up even when you’re going close by, public transport has stops quite often so we don’t have to walk more than 2-3 blocks at a time, and the center of the city is connected by the underground path. The path is basically a series of underground “tunnels”, which look more like malls that connect to different buildings around the city. The Path has everything you can think of: from supermarkets, food courts and pharmacies to cobblers, dentists and gyms.

To be honest, having survived 113 °F - 122 °F heat wave in Paraguay, it was quite a relief to be back for the end of the Torontonian fall. Let’s see how the winter goes in the upcoming months. Meanwhile stay connected! Next week I answer: Hey, so how is Toronto, do you like it?