Why don’t we have these in Canada? Sure we all know about “Persian blinds”, but it seems nobody in our cities actually has them (they’re more a country-cottage kind of thing)… Here in Spain, it seems every building has them. The roll-down kind on the outside (with a convenient cord inside for raising and lowering).
Shops have the industrial-strength metal roll-down persianas that make the streets look deserted after closing hours (but conveniently prevent people from smashing large objects though display windows). In Canada I’m used to seeing our stores lit up all night. They look warm and inviting “twenty-four-seven”, as the expression goes. Do we do this because the light prevents burglars? Makes us feel less depressed? Helps keep our energy economy chugging along? I know plenty of shops along St-Laurent and St-Denis in Montréal who probably wish they had large industrial-strength metal covers over their windows — windows there seem to get smashed fairly often in innocent night-time drunkenness or good-natured post-club rioting.
In Barcelona (and other places I’ve been to in Spain), the houses and apartments also have persianas — the discreet off-white plastic versions — on all their windows. They’re great to reflect out the summer heat, to reduce noise, for security(?) and to provide millions of blank canvases for graffiti artists to tag. But most importantly, they block about — oh, I don’t know, this is just a wild guess — 100% of the light!
To someone like me, used to awakening to 4:30am summer light (even in winter it starts to get light in Montréal before 7am, though it’s dark again by 5pm), they are an amazing “discovery”. In fact, they work a bit too well. My body must rely on light cues to regulate itself because, given a perfectly blackened room, it appears I can sleep for an indefinite period of time. It’s always a shock to look over at the clock and see that it’s 10am or — oops! — noon. And even more shocking to find that behind those magical blinds, far too high in the blue sky, is a brilliant sun.