Holidays on Ice

Well, I sat at the window this morning and watched the cars tiptoe their way down the "Church Road" -- the sort of steep road, but not as steep as another more major road, that leads from our location up on the ridge down to the lower elevation where the Consulate and downtown Vlad are located, and which is visible directly out our front windows. I find it kind of fascinating to watch the activity on the road and judge from that what it's like outside. Today what it tells me, or really confirms for me is: the slipping and sliding that everyone predicted for the winter has begun.

We had our first major snowstorm on Saturday, which was kind of exciting. It basically snowed all day, with the temperatures hovering around zero, and then when the snowfall stopped (see the photo), the wind picked up and the temperature began to fall. From Sunday (which turned out to be a White Orthodox Christmas) onward, it has been colder again -- minus 5-10C -- and, due to the lack of any salt or sand distributed on the roads, pretty slick. Happy to say that the XTerra does great in the snow, especially in 4WD, it's the other guys that you kind of wonder about!

Until today, however, at least there weren't many other drivers on the roads, since it was "The Holidays." I don't know whether you have seen this article in the New York Times about the winter vacation here in Russia, but it is pretty interesting: http://tinyurl.com/yzpl2h. Basically the whole place shuts down for a couple of weeks surrounding New Year's and Eastern Christmas. In fact, I hadn't really realized that this was only made official by Prez Putin in 2005 -- I remember things shutting down, in I guess what must have been an unofficial capacity, during my other winter stays here, too. Unfortunately Dan was down with the flu, or recovering from it, for the better part of the week, which he too had off from work. But we did manage to take a couple of drives and relax a little bit during that time, photos of which are on Flickr.