Vienna isn’t as cold as people imagine. Summers are warm, sometimes hot, and winters are chilly but not particularly snow-filled. Temperatures here run, on average, only about 5 degrees cooler than our home in the US mid-Atlantic. It’s not unusual here to have summer high temperatures in the 90s.

The experience of those temperatures is vastly different, though. With a nearly complete lack of air conditioning anywhere, we feel each one of those 90+ degrees. There’s no respite from it — it’s 90 degrees outside, in the house, in the stores, on the trains. It’s 90 when you step out of the shower, and you start to sweat before you’re dry. Then it’s 80 while you sleep. It’s rough to get used to if you don’t like the heat. (I am grateful, though, that Vienna is generally such a breezy city, and that the humidity is typically low compared to what I’m used to.) In fact, I consider the summer heat one of my least favorite things about living in Vienna.

But then, we get days like today, and I instantly forget what I disliked about living in Vienna in the summer. Today we had a high of nearly 80, with beautifully blue skies and puffy clouds. The rest of the week is supposed to be like this, too — of course, until it gets COOLER, just in time for the weekend.

It’s August. I’m not sure I ever experienced a week of weather like this in August in my entire life before I moved here. It’s pretty wonderful.