Sneeuw!

It is snowing! Most of you have seen snow before, and some of you have a lot more experience with it than you want, but this has been a week of fascinating weather firsts for me. On Tuesday it pseudo-snowed for two hours. I was told it wasn’t really snow, only kinda-snow. It was snowish icy stuff falling from the sky though, which I’d still never seen, and fell in big chunks that melted moments after hitting the ground. After an hour some metal eaves and the tall grass started to build up wet slush, but that was the extent of it, though for half an hour it did come down pretty fast. I was surprised by how heavy these little snow-ice-chunks falling from the sky were. They made a clicking sound when they struck my jacket. And I think they had it out for my eyebrows and eyelashes.

On Wednesday morning everything was covered with thick ice and frost. The slush from Tuesday had re-frozen over everything creating a very white, slippery world. The fog was still thick, and the naked trees were white and icy, creating the eerie gray and white frostscape I’d only ever seen in pictures. It was much more exiting to see it in person. That morning I learned about sleet on my bike ride to work through some brutally cold wind. It was microscopic frozen rain, very quietly hissing against my jacket as I challenged the ground ice at top speed. The elevated ruffles on my outer jacket layers collected the particles, and by the time I got to work I looked like a cobalt tiger with jagged white stripes. And white eyebrows.

This morning I left a numbingly cold Gent, and stepped off of the train in Harelbeke into about a centimeter of snow (apparently even Flanders has microclimates). It had been falling there for a little while, and was continuing to pick up. This snow was smaller than the Tuesday ice drop, and was coming down in interesting, swooping ways following little contours in the wind. I picked up a fluffy pile of snow and tossed it into the street (by then already a chocolate slushy). It still “clicked” off of my jacket and got in my eyebrows and eyelashes.

It was coming down even faster as I tore through Zwevegem on my bike, and I learned that while riding very fast, snow in the face stings, and wow does it jab you in the eye constantly. By then the squares and lawns in Zwevegem were thoroughly covered. The Markt looked like a huge flat sheet of quilt batting, and all of the grass expanses looked like they’d been replaced by polystyrene. It was interesting to see how the powdery phenomenon behaved- sticking into the bark on the windward side of trees, gathering on the tops of juniper branches in little tufts, collecting on eves and windshields. I crunched through the biggest piles I could find when I got to work (which weren’t terribly deep, since I guess this is pretty mild snowfall). Still, this is the first time I’ve ever seen it snow all the same, and quite exciting. Still, even the so-called "fluffy" snow isn't so fluffy- I'm surprised by how hard and heavy it is.

As soon as I got to work a coworker took a few pictures of it. The snow won’t leave my eyebrows alone even in pictures! It's supposed to stop snowing and rain later on, but then snow more and stronger tomorrow.