snow

Snow, frozen precipitation, it falls from the sky, it gets cold, it gets wet, and it gets slippery. I know these things, I am not a meteorologist, I have no training. The BBC gave at least 4 days notice that it was likely to snow. So why did it take me 4 hours to get home?

The train was 30 minutes late. There’s a Trans-Siberian Railway (Trans-Mongolian line) it goes from Moscow to Beijing, through Mongolia. It gets cold, these are cold places, for February, in Moscow the average maximum temperature is -6, it’s not hit that here, in Beijing it’s 4, for Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia, it’s -13, where we are unlikely to hit until global warming really hits.

Why can they get a train to go? Practice I guess, that line is over 4 736 miles long, I needed to go less than 5, but it took 45 minutes to get to town. Waiting for the bus in the snow was unpleasant, the snow had soaked my shoes and my feet were cold, but that was the worst of it. The thick coat, gloves, lovingly knitted scarf and hat helped a lot with that.

So on to the bus, 45 minutes into what is normally a 60 minuets journey. I’ve been to Prague, when we arrived it was -10 (much to DuLa’s trauma) the bus was one of those bendy ones, took us from the airport to the town, no problems, traffic at 50km an hour.

I spent over 2 hours on a bus that got me ½ way from town to home. The emb, who had walked to the bus stop to meet me than called to say that the buses couldn’t get up the hill by where we live, so he came to get me, bless, we then spent an hour and 10 minutes in the car, trying to get home, on the plus side he brought supplies and we had the heat up to 27° with heated seats.

I was glad to be home, but 4 hours is silly to go under 10 miles.