The Country That Loses the Sun for Months and Shrugs vs. The Country That Gets Every Season in One Afternoon and Just Deals With It

🇮🇸 Iceland · 🇨🇴 Colombia By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

In Reykjavík in December, the sun clocks in for a grand total of four hours and seven minutes before clocking straight back out, and Icelanders respond to this by lighting candles and getting in a hot pot like it's a completely reasonable Tuesday. In Bogotá, you can experience a cold foggy dawn, a scorching midday, and a genuinely biblical afternoon downpour, all before dinner, and Colombians respond to this by not owning an umbrella and complaining about it anyway. Both countries have weather that would break a lesser nation's spirit. Neither seems to have noticed.

Iceland's challenge is duration — total, prolonged darkness that most of the world would find genuinely destabilising. Colombia's challenge is unpredictability — four seasons compressed into a single afternoon, every single day, forever. One country copes by leaning into geothermal comfort and ritual. The other copes by simply accepting that getting rained on is a permanent condition of being alive in Bogotá. I've been humbled by both.

Do's & Don'ts

Iceland

Colombia

Iceland: Making Peace With the Dark

Iceland's winter weather problem isn't really about cold at all, which surprises almost everyone who hasn't been there. The average winter temperature sits around 0°C, thanks largely to the same geothermal and oceanic quirks that give the country its hot springs — genuinely milder than most people expect from a country this far north. The actual challenge is darkness, and it is total. On the winter solstice, Reykjavík gets a mere four hours and seven minutes of daylight, a stretch locals simply call "mørketiden," the dark time, with the same flat acceptance you'd use to describe a Tuesday commute.

What's genuinely instructive is how deliberately Icelandic culture has built coping mechanisms into daily life rather than treating the darkness as an obstacle to push through gritted teeth. Geothermal heating means nearly every home runs on natural hot water straight from the ground, cheap and constant, removing the "cold and dark" combination that makes winter genuinely miserable elsewhere. Layering becomes a serious, practiced skill rather than an afterthought — wool sweaters, waterproof shells, thermal underwear worn as standard daily gear, not special preparation for a big storm.

The social response matters just as much as the practical one. Geothermal hot pots aren't just a wellness amenity here, they're a primary social venue during the darkest months — the place people gather, talk, and process an entire season of reduced daylight together rather than isolating indoors. December, ironically the darkest month, gets filled deliberately with holiday events and treated as a genuinely cheerful stretch of the calendar, layered over with candles, wool blankets, soup, cured meats, and all the trappings of chosen cosiness rather than enforced hibernation. And crucially, Icelanders don't simply wait out the darkness indoors — ice caving, glacier hikes, skiing, and snowmobiling are treated as completely normal winter activities, not extreme sports reserved for the hardy.

None of this erases the real toll. Seasonal Affective Disorder is genuinely common during the long dark stretch, and light therapy lamps are a standard, unremarkable part of many households' winter routine — an acknowledgment that coping culturally doesn't mean pretending the darkness has no cost. Iceland doesn't fight its winter. It builds an entire seasonal culture designed to make the darkness bearable, sociable, and even, on the right night in a hot pot with good company, genuinely lovely.

Colombia: Four Seasons Before Lunch

Bogotá doesn't really have seasons in the conventional sense. It has a single, compressed daily weather cycle that repeats itself with almost mechanical reliability, earning the city its local nickname — "the fridge" — despite sitting well within the tropics. Perched at 2,640 metres above sea level, Bogotá holds an average temperature of just 13°C year-round, ranging between roughly 7°C and 21°C, a spread that owes far more to altitude than to latitude or actual season.

The genuine daily rhythm is what catches visitors off guard: cold, foggy, early mornings give way to intense midday sunshine and clear blue skies, before a distinctive smell and a sudden chilly wind announce the near-inevitable afternoon rain, which arrives not as a light drizzle but as a proper, committed downpour. This isn't occasional bad luck. It's close to a daily script, running from the wet season between April and November straight through to the comparatively drier stretch from December to March, which is "dry" only by Bogotá's own relative standards.

What's genuinely admirable is how little any of this disrupts daily life. Locals don't treat the afternoon rain as an emergency requiring cancelled plans; they simply build around it, the way someone elsewhere might plan around rush hour traffic. A chilly foggy morning, a warm bright midday, a torrential afternoon, and a cool evening can all happen within a single day, and Bogotanos navigate it with the same unbothered fluency Icelanders bring to four hours of December daylight — dressing in layers that can flex across a 14-degree daily swing, keeping something waterproof within reach without treating it as a big production.

The water infrastructure has adapted right alongside the culture. Bogotá's rain-fed reservoirs, highly sensitive to these very rainfall patterns, supply some 550 million cubic metres of water annually to the city and surrounding municipalities — meaning the same unpredictable afternoon deluge locals shrug off personally is also, quietly, doing serious civic work keeping the water supply running. It's weather that would exhaust most cities' patience within a week. Bogotá just built an entire infrastructure and daily rhythm around expecting it.

The Verdict

Iceland wins on sheer cultural ingenuity — turning months of near-total darkness into a season of hot pots, candlelight, and glacier hikes is genuinely impressive resilience dressed up as cosiness. Colombia wins on sheer consistency of unbotheredness — nobody there has had a "ruined" plan due to rain in living memory, because the rain was always coming and everyone already knew it. If forced to choose, I'd take Bogotá's daily chaos over Reykjavík's prolonged dark, if only because four seasons in an afternoon at least keeps things interesting. Iceland's darkness, however beautifully managed, still asks a lot of you by February.

What Nobody Warned You About

Moving to Iceland (expat blog) — paraphrased: a foreign resident describing the surprise of how mild the actual temperature felt compared to the psychological weight of the darkness itself, which took an entire winter to properly adjust to.

All Things Iceland — paraphrased: a longtime expat crediting the hot pot culture specifically with saving their first Icelandic winter, describing it as "mandatory therapy that happens to be outdoors."

Quora — paraphrased response on Bogotá's weather: a local explaining that nobody actually checks the forecast because the forecast is always, functionally, the same four-part daily sequence.

Conclusion

Both countries prove the same point from opposite directions: weather only breaks you if your culture hasn't built a ritual around surviving it. Iceland turned darkness into candlelight and communal bathing. Colombia turned daily unpredictability into a shrug and a spare jacket. Show up with the wrong expectations to either place and you'll be miserable within a week. Show up having actually read this, and you'll at least know to pack the wool sweater and the umbrella, respectively, before anyone has to tell you twice.