Day 254: Neither too much nor too little / Beloved darkness

Back in December, just before the winter solstice, I was on the verge of depression: the sun rose at 8 a.m. and set at 4 p.m. And during the day it always stayed very low on the horizon (11º), as if it were always sunset. It wasn’t enough light to illuminate a classroom or your room. If one day you went partying and/or went to bed late, it meant you wouldn’t see the sun at all the next day. Which is very frustrating for a Spaniard, used to a daily dose of vitamin D (to keep children in Dresden from getting rickets, they actually give them UV light treatments during the winter in hospitals).

But now we’re close to the summer solstice. Things have completely flipped. We’re at the opposite extreme. The sun rises at 3:49 and sets at 20:24. At 5 in the morning, the sun comes blazing through my window as if it were 11 a.m.

In Germany, as in most non-Mediterranean/Latin American countries, it’s rare to find houses with shutters. When I first arrived at my place (in September, when the sun was just like in Spain), I realized that the cheap fabric curtain in my room wouldn’t be enough to block the light coming through the window. So I went to Ikea and bought a Venetian blind (the kind with slats you can tilt with a little rod to regulate the incoming light). I installed it so close to the window that I could hardly open it (to open the window I have to lift the blind and fold it), but it was the only way to block all the light.

With the cheap fabric curtain and the Venetian blind, I got through the whole winter and the start of spring. But each day the sun rose earlier and shone more intensely, and my setup just wasn’t enough anymore. My body had developed a false adaptation to the bright morning light, and when it woke me up at 6 a.m., I would go back to sleep — but in the time before I actually had to get up, I wouldn’t rest properly. So if I didn’t take a nap after lunch, I couldn’t make it through the afternoon in class, and by nighttime I was always exhausted.

Yesterday I decided to fix the problem, and based on my scientific knowledge, I designed and built some ultramodern blinds to cover the glass on my window. The scientific principle is that light rarely passes through metals, no matter how thin they are. It’s the same principle used in astronauts’ helmets, which have a thin layer of gold so they can look at the sun in space without destroying their eyes. So I taped sheets of paper together to cover my window, then covered them with aluminum foil and, to give them structure, glued a cardboard frame to the back. I made a clip-based system to attach them to the window so I could put them on or remove them whenever I wanted.

Today is a holiday in Germany — they celebrate “Christi Himmelfahrt” (Ascension Day). So today was the perfect day to test my panels. And they worked wonderfully. My room was completely dark at 10 a.m. Now I can finally rest. Spain doesn’t need to be Europeanized — Europe needs to be “Spanishized.”

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