The Vagaries of the Weather

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?

 

Snow, the Sequel

After having lived in the frigidness that is Burgos in the wintertime for one week – okay, five days – I feel like I can talk about some lessons I’ve learned from living with snow. All you people who have lived in the snow before or who are less weak than I am can feel free to laugh at me, as you’ve likely known these things from birth, but indulge me, okay?

1. It is colder when it doesn’t snow than when it does. Now, as a good Atmospheric Sciences tutor, theoretically I know this to be true: when the skies are clear, it’s colder than when the skies are covered and (possibly) precipitating snow. However, I have just truly learned that this is true this past week. Today was cold, with snow and the temperature hovering around 0 degrees Celsius all day, but for some reason it didn’t seem as cold as the past few, very clear and sunny, days have felt. So I guess I grudgingly owe snow that bit of gratitude.

2. Slush sucks. Whoever invented slush or thought it would be cool to have snow kinda-sorta stick on the ground was just a huge jerk. I left my house this afternoon to go meet some friends for coffee, and by the time I finished my 7 minute walk to the cafe, my feet were wet and frozen because of the slushy crap on the ground. I would rather it was raining – I get rain, it’s wet, I know how to avoid puddles in the rain – or with a decent ground cover of snow than slushy. It’s deceptively wet and icky. And kind of snow, but really just not.

3. Snow is pretty when it falls. I am hugely retarded for having just written that sentence, I know, but I was walking back from the gym today in the gently falling snow, and I thought, “I get why people like this so much!” It was a serious moment of revelation (unfortunately followed a few short hours later by my slush adventure, please re-read point #2), and while all my body parts weren’t freezing themselves off at that moment, I was pretty sure snow was okay.

4. Windchill also sucks. Again, everything that I said about the suckiness of slush holds true for wind, as well. Burgos is infamous (apparently) for its wind, and it’s true – there are certain corners that I walk around every day that I know to expect strong winds at. But this is especially sucky when I read the weather report in the morning and it says, “40 degrees (YES! It’s warm outside today!), feels like 30 (GAH!)”. Wind should be banned from existence. Or at least people should come put up some turbines in Burgos to make it useful and energy efficient.

Alrighty, I think that’s all I need to quejarme (=complain) about this evening. I am warm in casa, and I have recently learned how my heating works (not a moment too soon!), so really things could be worse. I will TRY to get my post up about last weekend in Madrid – very exciting!! – sometime this weekend for all three of you who read my blog.

ADDENDUM!

I have found one more thing that seems to come with the wintery weather, learned today while walking home in a true snow-flurry, without an umbrella and rather cold:

5. People walk slower/are more annoying when it’s snowing. I love Spain and Spanish people in general, but aware of other people’s physical space they are not. Add to that the fact that every single person has an umbrella glued to their head which impedes their vision even more, and you have a population of people who are paying ZERO attention to you and other people walking in their space. No, perhaps NEGATIVE attention. The number of times I have been nearly stabbed in the eye by someone’s umbrella spike is insane. Also, when you have an umbrella, that means that you have to walk near the street and you cannot stroll under the overhang, because that’s where people without umbrellas (and therefore by definition want to get someplace quickly) have priority to walk. But I promise you people seem to stroll more when it’s yucky weather. With their umbrella spikes protuding. Ahhh, the danger!

 

Thoughts al azar

Basically I am posting this evening just to post, because I feel like I have been totally incommunicado for two whole weeks. And either my life is more boring this year than last year and I no longer have interesting stories to tell, or I feel like I’m doing many things all over again so that I don’t have to tell you about them as frequently. I’m not sure which one it is, but either way it makes me feel like a slacker blogger. I clearly need to learn how to make the more-frequent-less-wordy posts a reality. Therefore, what you guys get is just my general thoughts on life at the moment. Ready?

Let’s talk about work. I love it. It’s a totally different experience from last year, because whereas last year I was working in English classrooms (teaching the actual English language to students), this year I’m teaching other subjects just IN English in the bilingual program at my instituto. As one of the bilingual teachers pointed out last week, “It must be boring and hard to work in English classrooms, because you have nothing to talk about in English!” I hadn’t thought about that before, but it’s a good point. Sometimes I struggled last year (and continue to struggle in my private classes) because I couldn’t come up with an activity that would really energize the students to talk. I’m sure this partially due to the fact that they’re teenagers and have their own agendas, but it’s also because of what this teacher told me, that there are just so many fun ways to use the present continuous tense. So while I sometimes feel less used in the classrooms this year and am there largely to read, correct pronunciation and answer vocabulary questions, the students mostly seem much more motivated and talk more. That could just be these kids, too. Who knows?

The students themselves are largely encantadores (charming), and they continue to say hilarious things and drive us all slightly crazy. We were in a class of primeros last week (they’re roughly 7th graders), and they were just all over the place, talking and asking the most ridiculous questions, until finally the teacher turned to me half laughing, half desperate, and said, “Yo me quiero morir!” (“I want to die”). I enjoyed that very much, and it’s pretty much how things go sometimes. There are the good days and then the crazy ones.

Life in Burgos is pretty sweet, as well, aside from the increasingly cold weather. Today, for example, we had the most gorgeous fall day: mid-50s, overcast with threatening rain clouds (but no rain), and beautiful fall colors on all the trees. It was the perfect day for a walk along the river, enjoying the fact that we could be outside without getting frostbite. I have made it a goal of mine to go out and walk more, since there are beautiful neighborhoods right near me and it’s a good way to pass a lazy weekend afternoon, but we’ll see how that holds up as the weather really DOES get colder.

I had a friend, Abby, visiting from Logrono this weekend, and as we strolled along the river and chatted, we came to the realization that despite the fact that we’re living in a foreign country, both of us feel completely at home here. Sure, the customs are a bit different, speaking in Spanish sometimes feels a bit like “lost in translation,” and we’re thousands of miles away from family and friends, but we get it here. The afternoon coffee date with a friend has become habitual, and despite my inability to walk slowly, I’ve even been persuaded to pasear in the afternoons with the rest of the city on occasion. I love that many people want to have conversations with me about America just because they notice that my accent is different and that I have friends from all over the place. There’s so much I’m experiencing here that I couldn’t experience at home, and that makes this all so cool.

Those are my thoughts from the past week. Have a great week.

 

Vamonos!

So, here I am, on the even of my next adventure to Spain. This time I’m off to Burgos, in the region of Castilla y Leon, to assistant-teach in English classrooms at the IES Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente. I’m SUPER excited to be heading back to Spain, to see my friends there, and to see what this year has in store for me, but there are plenty of reasons that leaving is going to be hard again! Friends, family, perfect weather, comfort…but I suppose one of the reasons we travel is to get outside that comfort zone and experience new things.

This time around, as opposed to last year when I was leaving, I’m MUCH more composed and less anxious about the whole transition to a foreign country. At least I know basically what to expect – things will not work the way I want them to, I’ll be flustered because I can’t quite communicate everything I want to say as quickly as I’d like, I can’t just pick up my phone and dial home because a) it’s expensive and b) the time difference is killer – and that makes me sooo much calmer about the whole thing! And I have people who are “expecting me” in one way or another: fellow teachers at my school, people that I met last year, potential new friends through a Couch Surfing group I’ve joined. And I know everything is going to work itself out. I’ll find an apartment, I’ll get my bearings, and I’ll be into the routine before I know it. And in the meantime, I probably won’t even have time to be sad.

And as for adventures, I’m already planning on stopping by Logrono for a few days to take in their Fiestas de San Mateo, the week-long wine harvest festival that takes place at the end of September and is supposed to be really fun and interesting. I think being someplace familiar, with friends, will help me feel more quickly at home in Spain this time around. And really, it’s only 3 months until I get to come home for Christmas, so there’s really nothing too hard about that!

So, here’s to beginning the adventure!