A family friend has recently bought a villa in Alicante which he plans to rent to friends and relations. My wife asked me to check what the expected climate was. (Shes hate hot weather). I duly went onto the web and did a search on "climate alicante". One of the best sites gave monthly maximum and minimum figures (in Celcius, but a C/GF converter button was available), but the rainfall was listed as being "n/a".

I then decided to repeat the search, but this time I used "klima" instead of "climate". As expected, I hit a number of German sites. Looking through them, I found one which not only gave monthly average maximum and minimum temperatures for each month, but also hours of sunshine, number of rainy days and the average temperature of the sea! (Everything was in metric of course!)

Moral of the story - metric is universal and if you are prepared to use a foreign language, you can often find unexpected information. In my case, only a little German was needed because to me metric untis are not "foreign".

True.

http://weather.cnn.com/weather/forecast.jsp?locCode=LEAL

No good Steve - it is a weather site, not a climate site.

A climate site will tell me what to expect in October. A weather site will tell m ewhat to expect tomorrow.

es macht nicht

I'm not going there anyway!

<<
Moral of the story - metric is universal and if you are prepared to use a foreign language, you can often find unexpected information. In my case, only a little German was needed because to me metric untis are not "foreign".
>>

So you're willing to learn a bit of a foreign language but not a bit of a foreign measurement system?

What foreign measurement system?

Ah! So you don't think "imperial" is foreign.

But then again you are bilingual in that department (like most english speakers)

<<
But then again you are bilingual in that department (like most english speakers)
>>

Steve, if there was any sarcasm in that statement, I will have you know that (by English standards anyway) I am certainly bilingual.

AS jy my nie glo nie, vra mos vir een van jou Suid Afrikaanse werkgenoote.

Bilingual as in you understand both metric and imperial.

No need to look for sarcasm

Mae'r cair yn araf

(just though you ought to know!)

Sorry Steve, I forgot that you were also bilingual (but the Welsh still can't play rugby!)

Something to think about:

"Portugal"

"2004"

You want climate data listed in imperial units for Alicante, Spain?

http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/geography/100/climdata/alican.htm

Or, how about:

http://www.worldclimate.com/climate/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N38W000+1102+08359W

78 is two degrees short of what I'd expect from a "summer" hol - so I won't be going there - too cool.

Thanks for these references Matt. They showed average temperature for each month and average rainfall fo reach month.

The best reference that I found (which was in German) showed :
1. The average maximum temperature
2. The average minimum temperature
3. The average monthly rainfall
4. The number of rainy days
5. The average sea temperature.

Did it mention anything about the statuses of relative heights between the fathers of you and Matt also?