First Heavy Snowfall

Last Sunday we had the first heavy snowfall of this winter season in Joensuu. As you can see in the photos in flickr gallery below, the landscape was really wonderful… quite like a postcard. Olalla and I decided to go outside after our late brunch and take a walk over the fresh snow to shoot some photos. It was a quite nice walk, also rather cold. The temperature was around zero, nothing compare with what we have ahead of us (probably -30 ºC). We welcomed the snow, not only because it’s beautiful, but because in November it’s quite a blessing. It makes everything brighter in the darkness. Bear in mind that we are in the middle of Kaamos, or Polar Night, and not until 9 a.m. there is some light to begin to fade away around 3 p.m. —or even earlier. We still have three weeks ahead until the trend is reversed and the light increases again. I’ll try to write about Kaamos in a future post.

Although we welcomed and enjoyed the snow on Sunday, the problem came on Monday. Since the temperature is all the time around zero, snow is in quasi-liquid state, or in other words it’s really humid since it’s almost thawing and freezing all the time. This makes the floor really slippery and dangerous. It’s really madness to drive, even with studded tires, since it makes the car behave more like a boat than really a car. The car is skidding almost all the time, and you have to be really carefully shifting lanes or turning on the streets. Even more keeping a safe distance from the car in front of you because the braking distance doubles or triples. The problem is that snow and ice doesn’t stick to the tarmac until it’s around -6 or -10 ºC. Then the ice stinks to the road and the sudden tires are able to get grip on the ice, not as good as in dry conditions, but I would say that surprisingly good. Anyhow, I’m not going to deny that sometimes I enjoy a little bit the skid the situation, but most of the times one have to be really careful.

As you can see in the pictures above, the parking lot of the university wasn’t that fancy on Monday as our Sunday photos.

Let’s hope that the temperatures decrease a little bit and stabilize around -6 ºC, which becomes to be a really great temperature to enjoy the snow and drive safely.

Joensuu’s weather forecast for the following days. Source FMI

PS/ Meanwhile we’ll try to enjoy the views.

View from my window… only on the light hours, of course. Then is like this