Snow way!

As I said, yesterday there were five inches of snow on the ground when I woke up, and it snowed practically all day. People told me it hadn’t snowed like that for anywhere between 15 and 30 years, although the news claimed 22. Either way, it was chaos: Provence isn’t used to getting snow like that, so nobody was prepared.

Unfortunately, my camera battery died partway through the day, so I didn’t get to photograph some of the cooler things, to wit: skiers on what’s effectively Aix’s “Main Street”; giant snowball fights; people throwing snowballs are cars, cyclists, and strangers. Kids didn’t have school and so played as if they’d never seen snow before—which they really hadn’t.

One group of kids was pelting a car with snowballs, and hit the girl who got out. She yelled at them, and they threw another which hit the girl in the face. Her dad jumped out of the car and started a yelling match with the kids. And people tried to sled down Aix’s narrow, windy streets.

Many stores—including the cyber café I have to use for Internet access—just didn’t bother opening because of the snow. The buses didn’t run and neither did the trains. At Marseille airport, thousands of people were stranded, and the police even shut down les autoroutes because it was too dangerous to drive. Admittedly, it was a lot of snow and the Provençaux aren’t prepared for it, but they seemed to overreact.

Yesterday our school closed at 3 p.m. and today it isn’t open at all. The streets and roads are deserted. People learned their lesson yesterday: don’t go out in the snow! Even now the snow has turned to slush, the town looks very pretty in the snow, especially last night when it was lit up with the remnants of Christmas lights.

Today the snow is just slush, but everything’s still closed, including many cafes and stores. No school, no afternoon meeting—now I know why former students called this program Aix-en-Vacances! I walked all the way to our program office for a group meeting at 2, only to find it had been cancelled. We’d gotten an email about that, but I don’t have the Internet where I live… very frustrating.

Class tomorrow, perhaps?