Tropical paradise

As I was walking out the airplane, I started feeling an increasingly powerful wave of heat around me. Along with this came a feeling of moisture that is only to be found in saunas and greenhouses. I thought it was something brief, related to that tunnel. Whenever I had looked at maps, I had clearly seen the equator just a few degrees below Singapore, but it never really crossed my mind that the implications of this would be so serious. Now I actually realized what all the weather forecasts and maps meant: the place has a climate no different than a jungle.
This made me very aprehensive at the beginning, and I kept asking people why it is so hot and moist at midnight on a day in March. "It's like this all a time" just couldn't be a true explanation. But our hosts were wearing t-shirts, shorts and sandals, so it had to be (not to mention that this made me feel ridiculous, since I was wearing heavy jeans and a sweater that kept me warm in the chilly airplane). It turns out that the weather was going to be extremely hot.
As we are driven to the hotel, questions pour and "Wow!"s and "Look!"s are to be heard ceaselessly. The vegetation is stunning: there are palm trees everywhere, flowers are blooming in many rich colors, and the grass seems even more vigorous than the carefully maintained lawn that I had seen in Cambridge (either of them). I ask whether for them the heat is more bearable and they say that it's just as annoying and extreme for their bodies just as it is for ours.
The next day, I discover the burning sun, a feature that makes a trip from one building from the other as incovenient as the blistering cold does for Cambridge. We are given hats and water (what a blessing!) and transported with air conditioned buses.
But after I walk around for a while, I start forgetting about the heat and focusing more on what's around me. Except for the buildings, almost everything is green. The vibrant city was turning out to be a beach-like resort as well. The gentle windchill, the hush of moving palmtrees, the sound of crickets, the brightly painted buildings made it all look more like one of the exotic resorts that people go to in the summer. The reality is, I had thought of this trip as being a vacation, since there's no more school, but I had never imagined it could be a holiday in the way that was turning out to be.
The heat was becoming more of a colateral issue; as long as there was shade, things were not only bearable, but actually wonderful. Our hosts are constantly surprised at our enthusiasm: they don't understand what we find so great about living in a place with the climate of a "paradise island". Surely, when they came to Harvard there wasn't that much to impress them (except for the snow that quickly turned into rain and then hail). But for me at least, walking around flip flops and wearing shorts at any time of the year is really more like moving away for good from where I live to some place where I'm always on vacation.