by Bettina Juszak

Staff Writer

A series of musings on American culture by a German exchange student:

Temperatures are nearing at the freezing point (in fact we’ve already hit it a couple of times), just standing around outside is not recommended anymore, and sane people are breaking out their heavy winter coats (not that there seem to be too many sane people around – seriously there are still students coming in shorts and t-shirts to school; it is a mystery to me how they don’t freeze to death). The car is frozen in the morning and takes ages to warm up, and getting out of my warm cozy bed at an ungodly hour proves to be even more challenging than usual.

But it still hasn’t snowed any considerable quantity.

I have been assured that it does normally snow a lot more at this point and that it will come, but as of yet I haven’t seen any indication of that. Last year’s infamous ice storm? Far from it (not that I necessarily want an ice storm, but still, a little chaos and some (or a lot) snow days, would be nice – especially with that really short Christmas and New Year’s break). A bit ironic actually – at the moment Germany is being buried in snow, causing a lot of chaos (especially traffic-wise) everywhere (people are already more than tired of having to shovel snow out of the driveways), whereas here you can find a glorious amount of nothing. All Seniors are waiting anxiously for as many snow days as possible, but the weatherman is disappointing them. Instead we actually get days of just rain, rain, rain (it shouldn’t be allowed to be so cold and rain at the same time) or just plain cold days without any puffy white. Isn’t that unfair? I can already see it snowing buckets as soon as school is out…

What remains is waiting, waiting, and maybe some more waiting. We all better pray, especially dedicatedly for a Christmas with more than one inch of fluffy whiteness this year.