The screenshot below of the weather forecast for the net few days pretty much sums up our recent weather, though the past two weeks have involved a bit more constant precipitation that is predicted for the next few days. (And a quick Russian lesson - the words in the column on the right are the days of the week from Saturday through Thursday... I have the language on my phone set as Russian). Anyway, notice the little icons on the second and third lines (Sunday and Monday). Yep. Rain and snow. Together. And the temperature isn't actually supposed to go below freezing on either day. Together, a perfect recipe for slush! And then, once everything's nice and slushy, it's going to get colder and the slush is going to freeze... I'll I'm going to say is that I am glad that I don't have to go far to get to the school or to my favorite grocery store!
This sort of weather is, in one respect, rather nice - much kinder on the skin since the air isn't quite as bitterly cold and snowflakes don't turn into sharp little flying crystals of ice (which, in combination with some wind, are quite painful... I found that out the hard way...). However, this sort of weather really can't be beaten in terms of the mess it creates. By itself, muddy snow is pretty messy; add in some rain to soften it up a bit more and it ends up even messier. Once everything's been coated with a layer of rain and slush, along comes a day or two of below-freezing temperatures to turn that slush into ice and the sidewalks and streets can become flat-out dangerous. I am extremely lucky that the Vaganova Academy makes sure to keep the courtyards as safe and ice-free as possible (by quickly shoveling up any snow and putting salt crystals wherever ice buildups are prone to occurring), so I don't have to worry too much about the trek between the dorms and the school.
Going elsewhere can be an entirely different story. The buildings in Saint Petersburg come right up to the edge of the street, barely leaving room for a narrow sidewalk and definitely not leaving space for even the skinniest strip of grass or other vegetation. That means that all of the drainpipes leading from the gutters lining the roofs of the buildings drain directly onto the sidewalk. They can't even drain into gaps between the buildings, since, for the most part, there are none. On the bigger streets, where the majority of the shops and restaurants are, the business owners make sure to keep the mess coming from the drainpipes in front of their store in check, but venturing onto any other street means having to skirt around icy patches (often frozen on top of uneven sidewalks) every few meters. The trick is to be careful, wear shoes with good traction, and pay close attention to your feet. It's sometimes so icy that it's safer to walk along the very edge of the street instead of on the sidewalk, especially since the streets with the biggest ice problem tend to have little automobile traffic. In any case, it's a good idea to take some friends along, too, that way everyone can be on the lookout for hazards of both the icy and automobile varieties.
(Each one of the metal pipes going down the sides of the buildings, about one every five windows or so, is a drainpipe).
The drainpipes also bring me to a story about another winter phenomenon (sort of) with which I have recently become acquainted. Last weekend, while standing with some friends as we waited for our bus to come, I heard a loud crash, like somebody had just dropped a pile of heavy boards. I jumped and looked around for the source of the noise, confused because we were on a very large commercial street, an unlikely place to find someone toting around a big bundle of two-by-fours.
My Finnish buddy, Roosa, was standing there, entirely undisturbed by the noise, which just furthered my confusion, so I asked her if she knew what it was. She told me that it was just some ice falling down, which didn't really clear things up because I definitely hadn't seen any ice falling down from anywhere. Then she clarified - it was probably inside one of the nearby drainpipes. Then I got it. The crashing I had just heard was the sound of giant chunks of ice, previously stuck to the inside of a drainpipe, coming loose and falling down through the pipe from a starting height of up to six stories off of the ground. Colorado tends not to get much rain - if there's precipitation in winter, it's most definitely going to be snow - and we seem not to have drainpipes with diameters quite as large as the diameters of the drainpipes in Saint Petersburg (there's got to be enough room for a big chunk of ice to form and still more for it to be able to fall down inside the drainpipe), so this is something I'd never witnessed before. I've gotten used to it, though. Now I, too, don't even look up when I hear the giant crashing noise coming from somewhere nearby. I know what it is.
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