lavirrA

As I write this, I'm sitting in my room, which is on the top floor of our house and looks over the street which was blanketed in snow last night. It's currently snowing now, very fine feathery flakes, and it's supposed to continue for the rest of the morning and afternoon. They're saying that it's a 40-year snow for London. Which is bad since London and snow mix about as well as the American South and snow do. The city is having to ration the amount of salt they put on the roads because they don't really have enough to go around. Sidewalks are almost never cleared unless they are along a main road. Even then, the city usually just breaks up the snow-trodden-into-ice. Things were clearing up yesterday, but the current snow starts the whole process all over again.

Perhaps I should begin by telling you that I woke up last Thursday, the day I left for the UK, from a call from US Airways saying that my flight to Gatwick had been canceled. Gatwick and Heathrow airports had both been closed due to the winter weather. I immediately called US Airways back and rescheduled a different route for the same evening-- first to Frankfurt then to Heathrow. The flight wasn't great-- US Airways international flights are very uncomfortable and I barely slept. Frankfurt airport is kind of shabby, although I did get to fly Lufthansa to London (which was nice). I arrived 6 hours after I was supposed to arrive, which is better than how the professor here fared. His plane was diverted en route to Glasgow, and although the airline had originally planned to transfer all of its passengers on that flight to London, it required them to sit on the tarmac for 3 hours. If that wasn’t enough, the airline then kicked them off the plane and washed their hands of them. Dr. P had to take a train from Glasgow to London at his own expense. Despite the inconvenience, the snow is gorgeous. My neighborhood is particularly beautiful.