I accidently came across Kiun B – on YouTube and I spent a whole evening watching her videos. She lives in Yakutsk, the coldest city on Earth.
In Yakutsk, everything is a chore during the winter because of the severe weather. In one particular video, a young boy gets up very early to top up the fire with logs because if the fire goes out the house can get extremely cold. Many homes don’t have a plumbing system. They have to melt giant blocks of ice for water, and they use outhouses and pit toilets. It takes hours to prepare the bathhouse, so baths are only once a week.
Even owning a car is a huge challenge so most people use public transport. Apart from the dangerous driving conditions, some car owners are known to keep the engine running constantly to stop it from freezing. Some use a portable insulated garage, which is like a huge quilt that completely covers the car. To keep the car from cooling down, a rubber pipe is used to vent the exhaust gas. These covers take ten or fifteen minutes to put on every time the car is parked.
Some fit parking heaters to their engines and some use timers that turn the engine on and off automatically. Oh, they have to constantly pump their tyres too. I think I’d be happier getting the bus.
Their summers are short and that’s when they prepare for their long cold winters ahead.
The one thing that truly amazes me about the people living here is how little they complain about their winter weather. They just get on with life regardless of how cold it is. They continue to go to work and school closes only when the temperature drops to −56°C. They dress up and go out socialising. They can’t be outdoors for longer than fifteen minutes, so there’s no dilly dallying.
In Ireland, the schools close when it gets too windy or if the roads get too icy. We’re just not set up or prepared for harsh weather, which is fairly mild compared to what some countries get. People here complain constantly about the weather. It’s a topic of conversation nearly every day of the week. You would think that we’d have accepted our weather for what it is. We can’t change it, but we can dress appropriately for it, go out in it, and even enjoy it.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in Ireland was −19.1°C and that was in 1881. In 2010 we had -17.5°. In 2025 the lowest we had to endure was −4.4°C
Even our coldest days are warmer than they used to be.
Learning about life in Yakutsk makes me complain less about our cold, damp weather here in Ireland. It’s not so bad, really, but… if we had nice summers, maybe the winters wouldn’t bother us so much.
Gloria McBreen 