Nog meer sneeuw!

That is: "even more snow!"

In case you were wondering, the amount of snow needed to bring the Dutch public transport system to its knees is approximately one half inch.  Yesterday we got around a whole inch.  It is pretty delightful.  I love that squeaky crunch sound that snow makes when it is really cold out.  This morning it was down to around 8 degrees (-13 Celsius) and I don't think it ever got up above 15.  But the sun was shining almost all day and it was just beautiful.

Although the snow stopped the trains going (The transport system "tweeted", apparently in response to customer concerns about the slowness of regular train service to resume--"We don't know what all the fuss is.  They still don't have trains running in Antarctica, do they?") it didn't stop the Afrikaanderplein Markt.  Although it was pretty slushy.  But, I got eggs and plums and didn't freeze to death or slip and fall in the slush puddles, so it was a good day.

In the Netherlands, they are somewhat hampered with regard to snow removal because many of the side roads and most of the sidewalks are made out of paving stones set in sand and not out of regular pavement.  This makes repairing pipes under the streets fast, convenient, and cheap but it makes plowing impossible--if you caught a corner of a stone with the plow blade you would just rip the street up.  As a result, while a few people shoveled with little hand shovels, most people just threw out some salt and called it good.  This results in some rather disgusting slush puddles.  On the streets where there is pavement, then they did have plows out.  They even have plows with blades the correct size to clear out the bike lanes.

The picture on the right is of a sidewalk which has been ripped up a little.  They build the side walks and the roads by making a flat base of sand, lining up the blocks on top of it, covering them with more sand, then running a giant pounding machine over the blocks to settle them, and then sweeping up the leftover sand.


The Dutch, generally, seem pretty tickled about the snow.  There were loads of people out running around, playing in the snow, and seeming pretty cheerful overall.

I do not know how things are freezing up in Friesland (to run the Elfstedentoch they need to have 6" of ice all along the route) but the canals are frozen over here in Rotterdam.  I was out walking and shopping this afternoon, unfortunately without my camera, and, lo and behold, there were a whole bunch of folks playing on the canals.  They weren't skating, sadly.  They were just running around playing soccer in their tennis shoes.  I suppose that the snow was sufficient to provide traction but, as far as I was concerned, it would have been far superior if they were sailing along on skates, with their scarves floating behind them.  I might have gone back with my camera if they had been.  As it was, it mostly just looked like they were playing in a flat ditch.  I wouldn't have even known it was a canal if I hadn't seen it previously in an unfrozen state.