Pink Elephants And Needles Of Ice

Things certainly are cold here and getting colder all the time. Yesterday the wind was howling and driving blankets of wet snow along with it. Horizontal blizzard. I looked up as I got off the tram and my face was smattered with big wet flakes of snow that instantly melted and ran down my front. With a 40 kmh wind in your face it then becomes absolutely freeeeezing!!

As for Moscow, wow are they suffering the wildest extremes ever. We have a saying here, " Kannst du den Wodka von Ostwind her riechen?" or "Can you smell the vodka on the wind from the east?" When the wind blows hard out of the East from Russia, the temperatures here absolutely plummet like a stone a few days later.

It was -26 celsius in Moscow yesterday and 2 weeks ago it was down to -37 celsius. Out at the oil fields in Siberia it went down to -63 celsius. People in Moscow were being rushed to hospital with frozen eyeballs. Now that's what I call a very cold stare. They are enduring some of the coldest weather since 1927 and the death toll is steadily mounting.

A Russian circus resorted to giant vodka cocktails in an attempt to protect performing elephants from extreme cold. One of the animals got so drunk it nearly destroyed the circus. The clear liquor was added to the animals’ water buckets as they began to feel the chill of temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius. The elephant trainer was quoted as saying, "“Yesterday we gave one of the elephants a bucket and the circus lost its heater — the elephant just tore it off.” Zookeepers are taking a similar approach in the town of Lipetsk, south of Moscow, keeping macaque monkeys warm with sweet wine which is dispensed to them three times per day. I have heard of pink gins so maybe this is where pink elephants come from. He he he.

Last week we had 2 days of blanketing fog in Darmstadt. A real pea souper.

When I first awoke in the morning I thought it had snowed over night but as my eyes slowly peeled back with the dawn light I realised that it was not really snow white but more a very pale shade of grey. I though I was seeing things and after some eye rubbing I went out the back door and realised that everything was needled in ice which was allowing the colours from underneath to taint the colour of the ice.

The droplets of moisture in the fog froze to everything and produced these needle fine crystals, like cactus spines, in clumps along every outdoor surface. It was bizarrely pretty. The trees, the grass, the fences and even the cars which looked liked hedgehogs, were coated in it.

My friend Lynne took this picture on the same morning where she lives across town.



It really was just so beautiful and other worldly. I have never seen the likes of it before. A new highlight of life in a very cold Germany.