36.6°C is Normal? And Bats are Healthy

The metric system and I have always had a shaky relationship. The metric system has teased and taunted me all my life, especially rubbing it in my face by my love of the sciences (if you don’t understand this sentence, well then, get smarter).
However, my relationship hit a particularly rough part about a week and a half ago when the Russian government was afraid of me spreading Swine Flu like a deadly poison that I breathed and oozed out of my skin. At the time of all the craziness I was confused about whether or not I actually had a fever. See the confusion lies in the fact that I don’t know centigrade at all. I have absolutely no sense of what any temperature means. Its like the time when I went into a store when I was a little girl with a 20 dollar bill with a mission from my parents to buy a bagel, which costs approximately a buck and some change. Proudly I ordered the bagel all by myself, waited in line patiently as my bagel was being prepared, paid at the counter, barely tall enough to see the lady behind the cash register, and walked out with my change. Of course I should have had about 18 bucks and change, but instead I had about 4 dollars and change. That stupid woman behind the counter seized on my stupidity, just like the metric system. That woman knew that I had no concept of money, I had no idea how much change to get back, that I would just trust everyone would give the proper amount of change. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I am not sure how I could have been that dumb. But I was. I really had no concept of change. Of course I knew math, and was fairly good at it, but having to apply my skills in a real world situation was just too much, and proved too much. Well, me and centigrade are just like that. It could tell me any temperature and its equivalent in Fahrenheit and I would believe it. But I do have a few tricks up my sleeve. I have a Fahrenheit thermometer that I brought just to out sly that trickster centigrade.
So, when I was “sick” with Swine Flu, from the onset I took my temp 98.6°, which is normal, healthy as a bat, (I know bats aren’t known for their health, but I think bats have gotten a bad wrap these past centuries, and when I was in Ecuador I met quite a many healthy and kind bats. In fact, I am the head of the ‘Healthy as a Bat’ committee in my hometown. The movement has really gained a lot of support in the last few months, and I think soon we will have national representation soon). But just like centigrade and I don’t get along, Fahrenheit and my host family perhaps have an even worse relationship, so they urged me to take a stab at my temperature with their “Grodysnik aka Градусник” (thermometer: for those of you who cant understand my terrible Russian-English transliteration, or for those of you who don’t know Russian….) And well, I had a fever according to them at 36.7°. What? How could that be? According to my trusty “Farhenheit-nik” I didn’t have a temperature. I then converted my temperature from centigrade to Fahrenheit and found that I had a completely normal body temperature, if not a bit low.
So what exactly happened? Well I was obviously confused. Something somewhere went wrong. According to Fahrenheit I didn’t have a temperature. According to the centigrade thermometer, the Russians all seemed to think that I had a fever. And according to my conversion from centigrade to Fahrenheit I didn’t have a fever. So obviously this led me to believe that perhaps the Russian’s think that a fever is a different temperature that what we in the “normal” world think.
So I decided to do some of my own investigation. When you google ‘normal body temperature’ the first thing that shows up is google calculator that says normal temp is 37°. Yeah. I agree with that. And my temperature with centigrade thermometer was less than 37°, thusly how on earth did the Russians think that I had a fever? Next, I found a wikipedia article about “Normal Body Temperature.”  And one of the very first sentences in the article is about the history of getting a normal body temperature, and in the article, there is a sentence that reads:
In Russia and former Soviet countries, the commonly quoted value is 36.6°C (97.9°F), based on an armpit reading.
Seriously, this is like the strangest thing I have ever heard. The entire country is whack. They are all brainwashed. They think that our normal body temp of 37°C is a fever!!!!!
Whatever. It is crazy. This furthers my opinion that I really don’t understand this country and its crazy ways.