Victoria Faucanie, marketing director at Beaumarly, a Paris-based group of restaurants, hotels and clubs, said that when her company bought the building that housed the Café Français restaurant more than a decade ago, one dining room was air-conditioned but the other was not. At the time, this was not a problem because the temperatures were not as frequent or as persistent as they are now.
“With this high temperature, we are closing half the restaurant, so we are losing a lot of money,” Faucanie said. “We realized we needed to have air conditioning everywhere.” He added that the restaurant is in talks to have it next year.
Paige Dacanay, 31, who visits Madrid from San Diego during the summer, said she does not leave her rental apartment without two fans, one electric and one hand-held, and that on the hottest days she has taken up to three cold showers. “I was hoping not to have a ton of air conditioning, but living here without it is humbling,” he said. “You just have to be comfortable being hot.”
Renske Schuitmaker, 34, visited her home country of the Netherlands from Nairobi during the late June heat wave. Schuitmaker, who was pregnant during her trip, said she had to give up her rental and stay with relatives who had air conditioning in Amsterdam, where temperatures reached 90 degrees. Dutch authorities said that in the Netherlands, where air conditioning is rare, the June heat wave caused around 480 deaths.
Pamela Minucci, 64, and Robert Wilson, 65, who were visiting London from Connecticut for their daughter’s wedding, found themselves looking for places to sit in the shade. At one point, the pair sat in an air-conditioned pub and showed a cricket match for hours. When asked if they followed the sport, Wilson chuckled. “We did it that day,” he said.
