Whers has my winter gone?

---

I just arrived back in Amsterdam after a quick vacation home to see friends and family. A belated home for a holidays trip. And it was excellent. Very nice to be home. Being relatively alone for the holidays got to me more than I thought it would. But anyway, it’s time to start using actual sentences. Mostly. I make not promises as I do love ellipses, parentheses, and broken logic. (And the serial comma).

While I was home, Wisconsin had some record lows, getting to be as cold as -30 Fahrenheit with the windshield. It didn’t seem as cold as I thought it would, because while Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general don’t go below freezing for very long, December weather here was pretty miserable. It might have been hovering in the low thirties, but it was a wet and chilly cold. In the week or so before I left it started to (finally) stay cold and not be so damp. The canals even started freezing over which was pretty cool. The thin sheet of ice on all the bridges in the mornings and evenings; however, were not so cool, but it did seem as if winter had finally come to the Netherlands, and I was happy about it. Plus… the opportunity to go ice skating through the canals? Super Sweet.

So I left and it was starting to get wintery. I went home and it was an extra wintery winter. I loooved all the snow. It made me happy… probably because I didn’t have to go foraging through the snow piles to find and unearth my car. But I like snow and winter.
Side note: If I had to choose my absolute dream top 10 travel locations, 6 of the 10 were fairly remote and generally cold places, with Bhutan, Antarctica, Greenland, and Alaska placing at 1, 2, 5, and 10 respectively.
But anyway, I was really excited to come back to Amsterdam (armed with the winter coat I didn’t think I’d need) and go ice skating in the canals. The day I arrived the wind was really nippy and it was around 2 Celcius (35 Farenheiht?). Good coat. Friday… well, thanks to some lovely gent on the plane,,or trans-continental travel, or possibly airline food (probably the flu, given time limits, stupid dorky brain), I had a lovely gastro-intestinal effect/expulsion. So Friday? I spent staring out my window, watching Top Chef and not noticing the weather.

I was feeling better Saturday afternoon, but turned out to be one of those dayswhen the sky decided to dutch over Amsterdam in a perpetual cloud of mist. To be quite honest, these “hanger” days are pretty impressive. I’ve never seen fog with such absolute persistence. You leave for work…. Foggy foggy foggy. You glance out the window at lunch… foggy foggy with funny lights in the distance. You go home on the metro… big building, bright lights… everything else… obscured. There are days when literally all sight lines are veiled by an incredibly indispensable miasma. No wonder this country is partially known for its drug culture… the weather is really quite suitable. I have a separate informative statement on that one, but I’ll get to that one later.

Regardless, on Sunday, the weather was beautiful. I took my (wonderfully) unstolen bike out for some wheel spinning and enjoyed a day of thawed canals and 40+ F weather complete with emerging daffodils. (and yes, they were daffodils, I could see their yellow necks shyly exposing themselves to the world.

WHAT HAPPENED TO MY WINTER!?!?!

Arg. Blah. Oh Well.

I do miss winter. I’m a bit odded out by the concept of daffodils in January. Furthermore, I could have save myself like ten pounds of luggage lugging by leaving the winter stuff at home.

Next weekend I’m heading for some Alps.


On a final note, I now understand the fervent, must take action now, mentality that seized several of my colleagues 3 weeks ago when they took a day off work to go ice skating that seemed downright nuts to me at the time.

---