Snow and ice and snow...and ice

Well, winter has long since come to Thuringia. Two weekends ago was the first major dump, and there's been snow on the ground ever since. Of course, the first time it was magical; Washington gets very little snow normally, and even less that sticks, so we have rain and wind and rain and sometimes even freezing rain all winter. Snow is more dangerous than rain, but it's also much more fun and more beautiful, and I don't have a car anyway.

It started to get interesting, though, last Wednesday. I had to go to Jena for Russian class, and the walk to the train station is about 20 minutes long and (so not kidding here) uphill both ways. As I left the dorm, it began to rain, and by the time I was heading down the hill, the bricks of the sidewalk were all coated in a thin sheet of ice. I somehow made it alive and with my computer undamaged to the train station, only to find the same story in Jena. I tottered and slid to my Russian class and back, disgruntled and twitchy, and considering just going home and skipping our English Stammtisch.

The 20-minute walk to the restaurant where we have our conversation group took me about 45 minutes this time. Not because it was slick--oh, it was slick!--but because I was taking pictures. The rain had frozen, not just on the sidewalk, but on every leaf and branch of vegetation along the road, creating perfect imprints of the leaves' veins and making whole trees shimmer and shine in the light of the streetlamps. I imagine that if we ever figure out how to stop time, a rainstorm will look like the road up the hill did last Wednesday night: branches encased in clear crystal, raindrops frozen in the act of dripping. It looked like every twig had been dipped in molten glass. I'm sure I was quite a sight, oohing over half-dead bushes on the side of the road, and I never saw anyone else stop to look, which was a shame, because I got a lot of joy out of that slow walk up the hill.

It was still raining, and I stopped at one point until a tree to listen. All the snow was frozen over with a skin of ice, which made it shine oddly in the orange light. The falling rain made a gentle hiss, like white noise on a television, as it fell, but on the leaves above me, it clicked and clattered. By the time I finally made it to the restaurant, the rain had frozen and become...well, somewhere between rain and snow, without being hail. I tromped into the restaurant half an hour late and had a lovely time chatting with my companions and planning our Christmas party, and we left the restaurant an hour and a half later to find that the snow/rain had become straight-up snow, and a brand-new blanket about two inches thick had already fallen. So, now we had old, slushy snow covered in a sheet of ice covered by new snow. Thankfully, one of our Stammtisch companions drove us back to the dorm.

Now it's been warming up and melting, so the remaining snow has all been compacted into ice again. And now you know what the title of this post was about. Exciting, eh?