Snow

It was snowing in Berlin all day yesterday, though it really doesn’t seem to snow here like it does in Boston. At the end of a day like that in Boston, we’d have 8 or 9 inches at least. Here, we were left with maybe an inch or two of accumulation, though one of my students who comes from a small town a good way east of Berlin, in the Brandenburg countryside, said they had 40 cm (about 16 inches!) this morning. Here’s a picture from earlier in the year of the schoolyard in snow.

Anyway what I find interesting about snow here is that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of system for dealing with it, though it’s not exactly unexpected. The plan for handling snow seems to be an offshoot of the Bush plan for dealing with global warming: ignore it, and sooner or later it will go away. This extends to streets, sidewalks, anywhere snow might accumulate and be in the way. People walk on it, drive on it, ride their bikes on it, all the normal stuff except the obvious SHOVELING it and PLOWING it.

I’m being somewhat unfair here by not mentioning that many of the streets are paved with cobblestones, and clearly plowing would tear them up. The sidewalks, too, are paved either with granite slabs (about as slippery as anything I can imagine, even when they’re just wet, let alone snowy) or with hundreds of smallish (5 cm) squarish cobbles. Both streets and sidewalks are very attractive, but plowing and shoveling wouldn’t be very practical.

So, instead of getting cleared off, the snow gets packed down into a solid, frozen, slippery crust. The students at school enjoy this crust and (with a little instigation from me, I admit) took to taking a good running start across the playground to seeing how far they could slide. On the other hand, it made the soccer court somewhat more of an adventure than usual. One day two of the kids and I played a game at our local playground in which actual soccer skill was irrelevant, it was only about who could stop and then get going again in the right direction first.

Surprisingly, they don’t use salt here, either, nor sand. Instead they spread tiny bits of broken stone on the sidewalks (see picture), which have a lovely habit of working their way into the soles of your shoes so as to scratch up the nice parquet floors. Perhaps there is some agreement between the flooring companies and the guys who work on the sidewalks; maybe it’s even the same guys but in different seasons. I expect this goes some way toward explaining why in most German households you take your shoes off when you come in; otherwise your floors get ruined and you have to have them refinished or go to IKEA to buy a cheap laminate flooring to put over it. Or a rug, but then you’d need a vacuum cleaner, too. Oy. (Side note: a nice little tradition here is to have a selection of guest slippers that visitors can wear. I like it!)