But I'm not sure I could deal with no sun for so long. I get depressed without sunlight.
Well, for the exchange we get plenty of sun during summer. It never really get dark then. I don't live above polar circle, so no actual midnight sun, but at the midsummer last hue of red from sundown is still there when sun starts to rise again. And it never really gets dark then.
As a general we around here are very light dependant. It's totally different country and lifestyle for summer and winter and we are still enough pagans that we have two big celebrations during a year, winter and summer solstice. Hard work of the Church for closer to thousand year has managed to mask our winter solstice celebrations somewhat Christian, though we still celebrate 'coming of light' (and as much in literal sense as religious) and use the Holiday to also look back (one of the most pervasive tradition of our Christmas is remembering those who are gone, everyone goes to cemetery to light the candles to their deceased loved ones even if not buried to a cemetery close to you, there is a place to land a candle for the memory of those who are not buried there.) Midsummer, the other real biggie to us, on the other hand is quite openly pagan and all about worshipping the light and sun. We even perform pagan magic rituals then, as a joke or because of sense of tradition though, but still we do.
We have had few thousand years to get used to extreme light variations and we mostly get by. Accept that we need more sleep and chocolate during the dark period and are half hypomanic during the summer, but for foreigners it tends to be tough. Last winter we had that Californian guy (difficult child's former flat mate, who came to play in Souther Europe but ended here middle of the darkest fall) first living with us for couple weeks and then spending a night or two a week with us visiting. For the poor boy the darkness and lack of sun was really tough. Of course he did know he came to north to live and play and knew it would be dark, and he had spent quite a lot of time in northern USA for years (college and so on), so the winter was something he was already used to, but the reality of it was still a huge shock to him. Coupled with terrible home sickness the poor boy was ready to give up quite often. He did brave it out though, but made sure to stay in souther parts of the world for this season. We do hope he will be able to visit us next summer though, so we can at least show him the other side of the coin too