Foreign Perspectives

The photo shows the kind of weather we were expecting to get this February but in reality that photo was taken in January 2006.

Naturally, everyone went out and bought snow chains after the snow that you see in the photo. In fact, that is the only day that we have had snow in three years. All that snow landed in a matter of hours one day in January last year, was completely gone the next day and a few days afterwards we were back into the t-shirts.

This year we’ve not had any snow yet and have been in the t-shirts almost every day since February last year. Even the usual wind that comes mainly in the Winter in this area has kept away so we’ve been eating lunch outside nearly all of the time. Even more peculiar is the sight of the locals sunning themselves in the cafés around the town when ordinarily they wear really serious Winter clothing from mid-September through to the following May but with temperatures regularly over 20c for ages, even they are starting to adjust their habits.

Since we’re now equipped with snow chains, we were hoping to head out to one of the local ski resorts a few times over the Winter but even they have only been opened relatively recently compared to the more normal November to March. Net effect is that instead of ski-ers staying with us we’ve had normal tourists looking for somewhere a little warmer than more northerly parts of Europe.