Winter in Paris is usually mild and drizzly-- restaurants leave their cafe tables outside because you can sit there all year long. But after a weird warm spell at Christmas, it has suddenly gotten very cold this week and it's nine below zero today (that's in the teens in Fahrenheit, I believe; I've never completely made the adjustment to Celsius). It snowed all over France this week, although not in Paris.
One of my friends told me about some friends of hers who went skiing last week. It was so warm that there was no snow, and they couldn't ski a single day. Then on their way home to Paris, it started snowing, and the autoroute became so dangerous that it was shut down with the traffic still on it. They had to spend 20 hours in their car.
"Yes," said some workers who came to my house today, "in France the authorities do not know how to deal with bad weather. We were going to Switzerland on Tuesday. We left at 6 in the morning and it started pouring down snow. Between ten and eleven o'clock, they closed the A6 near Auxerre. Luckily our truck has independent heating and a place to sleep. The firemen came by later on and gave us a baguette with a piece of ham inside, but that was all we had eat-- we got pretty hungry! They evacuated all the emergency cases first, then the automobilistes; but they did not clear the roads until Wednesday afternoon, so we spent more than 30 hours in the truck."
That is a disaster. Can't you take some train where you go skiing? I think after one experience like that, i would quit skiing.
Posted by: Oya | 27 January 2007 at 16:43