The Tropical Creature's First Snow

June 3, 2016

For a warm-blooded mammal who has been been spoiled by sunshine and summer heat in a tropical archipelago, winter is a fairy tale.

As a tropical creature, I’ve always wondered how it would feel to see a snowflake, to be surrounded by bright piles of solidified liquid from the sky, to watch all those tiny dandruff-like stuff fall into someone else’s shoulders. It must be magical.

Finally… one day… I stopped wondering.

It was a relaxed morning in Groningen. My body clock hasn’t adjusted to the time zone yet so I woke up way earlier than Maui. It was still too dark because of the opaque curtains covering the flat’s windows, so after few minutes of morning rituals – forcing myself to get back to sleep until I give up – I got up to see the morning light — in the kitchen.

The sky was gloomy. It was the first day of our roadtrip so I was thinking it won’t be bright and shiny on the road. But something else was different in the air. I started to notice the white things falling in weird motion. I was still half awake but I almost jumped when I realized what it was. I rushed to the living room to look out the window and there it was!

MY FIRST SNOW!

The surrounding was covered in white! The road, the railway, the cars, the rooftops! Of course they are, I’d seen photos, but hey, it’s my first time seeing them in real life and it was surreal! It felt like I was in a Christmas Movie, or Home Alone 🙂

I was ecstatic. Excited like a child I went to the bedroom and whispered the news to Maui, and then I grabbed my camera and took some photos. I tried to be up-close with the snowflakes in the balcony. It was extremely cold but I wanted to have a clear view and the temperature suits the atmosphere.

When Maui woke up, we decided to take a stroll in the nearby park.

I may be wrong but it seems that some locals were also quite thrilled about the snow. There were people walking with their dog, kids riding a sledge with their father, a woman standing infront of the pond taking photos. The atmosphere was full of positive vibe. It was very bright despite the sky being gloomy.

What I Learned: So apparently, just because one area started snowing doesn’t mean it would be the same in the whole country, even if the country is as small as The Netherlands. I’ve always thought of snow as a massive, continuous event, like a country would be covered in snow for months during winter, but I guess I was wrong.

After lunch, we left Groningen and went to Utrecht, which didn’t have a single snowflake anywhere but was still pretty cold. I was a bit sad that we had to leave immediately but if we stayed for another day, we would’ve been stuck in Groningen because the weather got worse.