It is hot and sunny out here around the DC area. The normal weather for this time of the year - real warm, but not yet intolerably hot and humid. As a classic Estonian who is used to see weather this warm for about a total of maybe 20-30 days in a year, the temptation to drop everything and storm into the sun is irresistable. So I took a stroll, grabbed a coffee and headed back home - 2 more weeks of schoolwork to push myself through.
But time and again, when I happen to be in an area with really nice warm climate I find myself coming back to a thought I first developed on a trip to Portoroz, a small Slovenian town on the shore of Adriatic sea. Me and my friends were walking down the seaside and bought that Italian type of delicious ice-cream. When we sat down on the lawn and enjoyed the gorgeous view on the sea and the sunny warm weather, I started contemplating whether I would have been ever motivated to work that hard and get where I am now if I had been born and raised in this place. Because if you have a constantly enjoyable weather, warm sea and good friends, you could just as well simply sell the ice-cream and enjoy life. Not that I would change my life for that now, but I have certainly developed a better understanding of why many people in California prefer surfing to school :)
Up in the north, a much better paid job is needed to live an enjoyable and comfortable life. And with half of the year rainy, muddy, cold and windy, it was much easeir to stay inside and dig yourself into the world of books.
So at the end of the day, I still stand by my view that it is good to be born up north. I bet the weather has also at least some role in why the Protestant work ethics works so much better in the Northern half of Europe than it does, say, in Italy or Spain :D
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