Apocolypse Now

Dear Reader,

You may or may not know this but the English like to complain about the weather. A lot. They complain when it is too rainy, they complain when it is too "hot", but nothing gets the English into a verbal frenzy so much as *winter*. 'Tis a dreaded season because the second the mercury drops close to or, God forbid, below 0 degrees Celsius it is the only topic of conversation. You would think these people lived in Alaska or Norway the way they go on and on and on and on about how cold it is. To a person who is used to Ohio winters, England is exceptionally balmy on most days.

The second it starts snowing in England everything shuts down. And I mean everything. No trains, no buses, and no way of going anywhere, even by car. The thing here is that they forget that they ever had snow in this country. And, dear reader, you may be asking yourself "how would she know it's snowed before?" Because. Ask people who have lived here; they do recall it snowing in their lifetimes, but usually it does not snow very much or in the majority of the country.

The week before Christmas 2010 drastically changed this. Within the span of several hours FEET of snow fell in Ormskirk, and most of the country woke up that Saturday to a nightmarish blanket of white. This "Snow-pocalypse" halted almost all transportation in England. Perhaps I should put this into perspective for you, dear reader. This is a country that stops all buses and trains for two inches of snow and scatters to the nearest Tesco for emergency provisions. Ok, so maybe the last part of that statement was an exaggeration, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that I survived the English Snow-pocalypse and that it was a very big deal.

I was somehow lucky enough to have booked my flight home for that Sunday, as opposed to Saturday like most of the other American study abroad students. I had an extra day in Ormskirk and a friend and I decided we needed to get into town for last minute Christmas gifts and to drop off some clothes for the local charity shops. Never in my life have I had to shuffle through so much snow, even in Ohio. The difference being that in Ohio people will have the snow cleared quickly, but that in England no one so much as bothers to attempt to salt anything. Everything that was supposed to be opened that day, such as the Uni canteen and Uni shop was closed because no one in their right mind would leave their home. Being vastly unprepared, none of the snow was brushed or shoveled away and thus getting to the main gates of the University was hard enough. We soon found the same to be true of the sidewalks into town which made a usual ten minute walk into a half hour one.

The best thing that came from this near annihilation by Mother Nature was the sheer picturesqueness that a snow-covered small town could provide to two Americans who imagined snowy English winters such as this.