It's been snowing this week, and they are actually talking about a white christmas for this year. Now I know this sounds normal to some of my international readers, but let me explain. The last time the Netherlands had a white christmas, was in the year I was born. Yeah, you heard me right, 28 years ago!
So to us Dutchies, thats something special. It's pretty weird, last week it was still 10 or 12 degrees celsius and now this week it's been freezing and snowing! I guess winter wanted to make up the time lost or something..
Anyway, snow can be a lot of fun, riding on a sled, throwing snowballs at eachother, or making snowangels.
at the fun we had in 2005:
But, snow can be seriously annoying aswell. For example, when you fall and have to go to the emergency room, when you are standing in one of the biggest raffic jams ever, or when all the trains are cancelled.
Yesterday, when I looked out of our front window, I saw this:
I had to go to work and was watching the news on tv, where they were telling everyone not to travel by carm because you wouldn't get anywhere. They didn't really say anything about the trains, so I decided to just go to the train station as I normally do. It was a slippery walk, since they hadn't salted every footpath, but I got there in one piece. As usual the train was late. Normally I don't really care, since I'm reading a book anyway, but now it was like -4 degrees celsius, and I was C-O-L-D!. Anyway the train showed up and I got to go to work. Around 4 in the afternoon, the guys on the radio were telling me that a lot of trains weren;t going anywhere anymore, so I decided to look my train up online. Ofcourse the special page that tells you which trains are late and cancelled was NOT working. So I decided to stop working at 5 instead of 6, to make sure I was going to get home. Luckely for me and my boss, my exboss (now PRgirl) volunteered to finish my work, so I wouldn't have to worry about that. Thanx again Lenneke!
So I hurried to the trainstation and saw my train on one of the boards. It was supposed to go at 17:12, it was now 17:14, but the board also said ''different partingtime'' (is that even correct english...oh wth..). I decided NOT to get something warm to eat and see if that train was going to move in the next few minutes. That was on platform 7....and then it dissapeared on the boards. Now..it was going to be at platform 8. At 17:55 there still wasnt a train and there was a big crowd forming at the platform. Then the announcer told us the train would be at platform 15a. You have NO idea how it felt to be pused a long a platform and an escaltor with about 6000 other people who decided they had to be in that train NOW.
Ofcourse, at 16:05 the train dissappeard of the boards again... After 5 minutes the announcer told us, it was going to depart from platform 15B. This platform was a lot smaller, so the crowd was getting pushy.
To make a long story short, there WAS a train and they couldn't fit in everyone (d'oh), luckely for me I did get in, and sat down on some stairs to read.
I finally got home somewhere around 19:15-19:30, normally I would have been home an hour before that. Still, I was one of the lucky ones, some people had to wait a lot longer.