I think I mentioned something about snow in my last blog entry. Something about winter finally arriving, wasn’t it? Well, winter has certainly arrived. There can be no doubt about it. All you have to do is look out the window and you’ll see winter. That is if the snow hasn’t piled up so high that it has completely covered your house. Fortunately, I live on the third floor of my building so the snow hasn’t reached my windows.Yet.

Basically, if you haven’t guessed already, it’s been snowing a lot over the past few days. In fact, it hasn’t stopped snowing since my last blog entry. That’s about 5 days straight. When I talk about snow, I’m not talking about a light sprinkling. I’m talking about massive flakes of dry powder.

I have a garage under my apartment where I can park my car, but many people have to park their cars outside. These people have to wake up about half an hour earlier than usual just to clean all the snow off their cars and shovel a pathway from their car to the road. When I go to work, I have to leave my car outside. It takes about 30 minutes before my car is so covered that it just looks like another pile of snow.

My town has a fleet of snow ploughs that run all day every day. If they stop for more than a few hours, the snow piles up so high that driving becomes impossible. The snow plough’s job is to drive along and push the snow off the side of the road. This means that along the side of the road there are walls of snow that just keep getting higher and higher. In the town, along the main road, there are already piles of snow about 3 or 4 metres high.

Today I had to drive to the other town for work. It usually takes about 25 minutes, but today it took about 35 minutes (actually, this was a lot faster than I had expected). To get to the other town I had to go over a mountain pass. The snow on the road was about 30 or 40 centimetres deep in most places, as the snow plough hadn’t come through for an hour or two. Visibility was about 20 metres in most places. There were a number of times when I couldn’t tell where the side of the road was, whether or not the road was straight or turning, and whether I was even going in the right direction. It was all white. Usually you can see some kind of definition in the snow that shows where the middle of the road is, where the side of the road is, and where the walls of snow on the side of the road are. But today, there were times when it all just blended in and became a wall of white.

Along the way I passed two semi-trailers that had slid off the side of the road and tipped over. One was unoccupied. In the other truck, the driver was still strapped into his seat, drinking a can of coffee, even though the truck was tilted over about 45 degrees. He looked at me as I drove past, and the expression I saw on his face was one of boredom. For him, this was just another day.