The weather people in New Zealand had been reporting that at least the lower half of the South Island would be getting a dump of snow and that was what we got. Initial reports were saying that Christchurch was to expect it on Sunday and when I was at work, one of my friends and I were looking out of one of the staffroom windows and we both thought that the cloud to the south was snow cloud. Admittedly, I was expecting it to snow that afternoon.
What I wasn’t expecting was to wake up to:
I took this pic standing at the front door of our flat/apartment. Our driveway (we share it with five other flats/apartments) is covered in the fluffy white stuff. I even built a mini snowman!
If I wake up before the alarm on my cellphone goes off, I generally surf the net for a while before having a shower. On Monday, I woke up about half an hour before my alarm was due to go off and I went to stuff.co.nz, where one of the headlines was something along the lines of Christchurch being blanketed in snow. This made me pull back the curtains just to verify that snow had indeed fallen and I was immediately hyper.
I went to take photos on my digital camera but I didn’t realise that the batteries were flat until the camera died on me with the lens out (my digital camera’s lens comes out when you turn it on – and yes, I am aware of the sexual connocations [sp?] of what I’ve said) so I had to dash back inside to get my cellphone to take photos.
These are two of the pics that I took on my cellphone. The second one was taken on my way into work (the mall you can see in that pic is where I work pretty much and it’s within walking distance) and, at the time, I loved walking in the snow. I did manage to take a few pictures on my way into work and it was worth walking in the snow with no hat on my head, no scarf around my neck and no gloves on my hands! I’m from Southland so walking around in close to 0°C/32°F temperatures is nothing to me. Admittedly, when I did actually make it into work, my hands were the only parts of my body that were freezing and I knew that I had to let them warm up gradually because a big jump in temperature wasn’t good. Work even closed four hours earlier than normal because of the weather and also due to the fact that we were somewhat short-staffed because of the snow.
Walking home from work on Monday was more treacherous than walking in to work. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I wore a pair of sports shoes into work because they have more grip than my work shoes but even then, I was still slipping and sliding. Certain sides of streets are still somewhat covered in snow because they happen to be the side where a lot of sun doesn’t hit in winter. In saying that though, the snow has pretty much gone.
But it is nice to be able to wake up to snow, especially when the elevation on your home city and the city where you live isn’t that much above sea level. It’s also nice to find pages such as this one on Facebook too. The Press (Christchurch’s newspaper) had a beautiful picture of the city covered in snow on the front page yesterday.
