The Big Chill



Above the clouds



Macieks boarding track on the right, his two friends skiing tracks on the left

Buried chalets

It’s still winter.  Feels like it’s always been winter!  Waking up to bleached whiteness everyday is becoming a bit monotonous, it’s like living in black and white, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone so trying to appreciate it while it’s still here.  And it is magical when it snows, big fat flakes floating passed the window.  Apparently it’s the most snowfall this region has seen in 7 years.  When it snows the roads are cleared pretty quickly and very well, but all the snow from the road is fed to the sides of the road which has left walls of ice, some nearly 2 metres tall, and for a while driving around was like driving through an ice maze!  Blind corners everywhere (more than usual!) and difficult to find entrances to pretty obvious places like shopping centres and main roads!  Some of that has melted now, or has been chopped away.  Not long ago they were shoveling a metre of snow off the roof of our supermarket, as the roof is flat, and too bad if you were just strolling past as there were no signs up to let you know what was going on above, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair number of pedestrians became partially buried or at the very least copped a whopper of a headache and had to carry on with their journey soaked to the bone!  I went to get a trolley from the trolley park but couldn’t actually get one out as they’d been buried! 



We’ve spent many many mornings shoveling a few feet of it off our car and digging the car out so we can get to school, and everytime I say to Maciek ‘we must get a photo of us doing that’, but still haven’t, as in the rush to get everything organized, kids dressed in their marshmallow suits and getting out the door on time and then sorting out the car, the camera always gets forgotten.  The girls who parks next to us was holding a lighter to her car key one morning to try to defrost the lock which had frozen, and she couldn't open her car!  It’s been fun driving – NOT – skidding all over the place.  Maciek tried to be cool and chuck a ‘donut’ in the carpark of the hotel where he works only to get stuck and have a couple of his colleagues help push him out of his predicament!  How embarrassment! 



St Johann gondola, amelia calls it a bubble, noah calls it a zoom



There’s been lots of fun sledging, sliding on bumboards, and catching the gondola after work for a hot chocolate at the top, and animal foot print spotting in the snow (mostly deer and hare).  There were a few days in January where they closed the lifts altogether as it was too dangerous with the amount of snow and there were avalanche warnings.  Didn’t bother Maciek though, he considers himself too professional to be bothered by a measly thing such as an avalanche!  Dumkopf!  I did manage to go skiing for a couple of hours with a friend one Sunday morning.  We did more falling than skiing.  And unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the time to practice again since, so I am officially the worst skier in the family, apart from Noah, and that’s only because he’s two! 



Hot chocolate inside, frostbites outside



The temperature has been -20 or close to it the past two weeks.  You don’t spend much time outside in that!  Just getting from the car into school (literally 30 seconds) is painful, it does really feel like your skin is being bitten, and when you breathe you can actually feel the bits up your nose turning into little icicles!



 

 

taken by milly in the zoom

Buried trolleys