dear reader, again, bear with celsius and me, i am not changing.
i do not think in fahrenheit, i think in celsius and you, dear reader, will have to bear with me as i am not going to change.
when the school was closed some time ago, i noticed myself scrolling through my iphone gallery, watching photos of winters i miss. i will share this checklist with you.
oklahoma little win-tah: checked✅
i am from russia. i grew up in moscow. moscow winters are beautiful, but they are different from true russian ones: the temperature is usually around -15°c, sometimes reaching -25°c. we do get a lot of snow and ice, but what makes winter in moscow very special is all the christmas decorations around. i can’t imagine how many meters of lights are hung around the city. i adore going to the city center to see specially decorated christmas trees and bazaars with winter drinks and goodies from local creators. this beautiful and quite soft, more of a european, winter is the one i’m mostly used to.
european winter: checked ✅
i lived and grew up in moscow, but i had a chance to spend multiple winters in kind of stereotypically cold part of russia, where it is considered warm winter if it is -20°c, and it is average when it is -30°c. roads and streets are covered in ice permanently and you have to buy special tires, which prevent you from sliding. it is a law. i remember that feeling of freezing cold touching the skin of my cheeks and them becoming red almost immediately: it was not something bad, it was actually a blessing to be kissed by this frost. it was neither possible to properly look around: the sun was full-scale shining and the light reflected from ice and snow was basically blindfolding. this is the experience of all senses coming together not to see, but to feel true russian winter.
truly cold winter: checked ✅
another winter is something in between. my family owns a country house which is just a 5-hour drive from moscow. it was an old village house, but we managed to renovate it and now use it as more of a vacation home.
it is our new year tradition to go there and celebrate all possible winter holidays. this is why we have skiing, ice skating, winter fishing and other types of equipment there. my father bought a tracked snowmobile for our entertainment and just recently purchased a karp mobile. it is okay if none of this makes sense to you – these are hand-developed machines, based either on tractor or atv.
with my mother, we bought a funky snowball mold – it creates duckies instead of the usual round-shaped balls to prank my father by placing a hundred dozen of them on our terrace. in this type of winter, we enjoy ourselves, outdoors and everything winter has to offer.
fun winter: checked ✅
another, the last but not least winter i want to mention is armenian one. you can clearly see it coming: the mountain peaks will be covered in snow. you already know that here it is. it is snowing a lot and the views are breathtaking. this winter is quite warm, just from -5°c to -15°c, but it is one of the most beautiful ones.
mountain winter: checked ✅
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