I imagine that many of you are ridiculously tired of hearing me talk about how cold I am all the time and how snowy it is all the time here, but I feel like now I have new insight having been back in the last week and seeing just how quickly these things can change.

So, let’s just sum up the last week of my existence in Spain:

I arrived last Thursday and luckily made it back to Burgos before the middle of the country was blanketed with a snow storm that effectively shut down Barajas Airport for a day or two, cancelling hundreds of flights and basically causing tons of people to live in the airport all weekend. Meanwhile, I happened to be in the north of the country where the weather hovered around 10C all weekend and was generally glorious – I could even go out on Sunday afternoon without a jacket on, that’s how nice it was.

I got home on Sunday night, and then woke up Monday morning to -9C weather – that’s a difference of about 35F degrees in a 24 hour period. It literally did not make it out of negative degrees all day on Monday, which was rather swell.

Then, Tuesday it snows. And it was actually pretty nice – by pretty nice, I mean 0-2C during the day. See how this becomes relative all of a sudden? The temperature slowly warmed throughout the week, but never getting out of the double digits. And then WHAM – the most glorious weekend, with temperatures in the low 50s and sunshine and just a generally pleasant atmosphere to be outside in. I remember thinking, “Gosh, isn’t it a luxury to actually enjoy walking outside and window shopping as opposed to speed-walking as fast as possible so you don’t freeze in transit from your house to the bus to the school?”

Oh, and here’s the best part: tomorrow it’s supposed to be relatively nice again, and then another snow storm and highs of 2C throughout the middle of the week.  WHAT?!

I suppose here’s what I have concluded: A) winter weather outside of California rather sucks. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that icing on the cake: while I was literally freezing my rear end off, it was 70F in Palo Alto all week. Talk about totally unfair. B) I thought I was okay with the the winter weather, not dying so much, and then it was -9C for a day and I realized that winter weather is miserable. Why do people subject themselves to it? C) Why is it allowed to be in the 50s all weekend and get my hopes up only to plunge me back into freezing misery this week? This seems totally and cosmically cruel.

I have another conclusion, actually, and it’s this: the snow isn’t really so much the problem – in fact, I think walking through gently falling snow to catch the bus is rather romantic and beautiful – but it’s the ice that inevitably sticks around afterwards that’s the killer. I can guarantee a serious wipe out due to some combination of me walking too fast-me wearing shoes without appropriate grip-sneaky hiding patches of ice sometime in the near future. It’s a serious mine-field out there. And the worst is that you know it’s coming and can’t do anything about it! As in, “Oh, how lovely, it’s snowing, but it’s probably going to dip below freezing tonight and turn all the nice snow and melted snow into hidden ice rinks all over the sidewalk so that I fall and bruise my hip on my way to rushing to the bus.” Dangerous, I tell you.

So, there you go. Again, I’m sure everyone who actually has winters colder than 45F already knows this and is rolling their eyes at my silliness, but I was just so surprised by the sudden weather changes and how completely different each day can be from the next. Let’s hope I can learn to appreciate the beautiful weather for when it comes instead of dwelling on the below zero days, right?