Snow? What snow?

The big news story tonight in Greece is all the snow and the freezing temperatures coming in from Siberia. I was watching the news on one channel tonight, and they had a reporter who was supposedly in Thessaloniki, showing snow all around. Well, I've been looking outside all damn day and I'll be durned if we have any accumulation here in the Thessaloniki city center (I will assume they had their cameras up on some of the mountainous regions surrounding Thessaloniki). Yea, we had some flurries which you could barely see against the whitewash of the buildings across the street, but that hardly qualified as snow, and it seems to have stopped now.

Being from the American South, I am used to the vagaries of snow forecasts and the resulting widespread panic they can cause. In Nashville whenever snow was in the forecast, you could always find thousands of people flooding to the Green Hills Kroger, buying all the bottled water and milk they can find (as if anyone in Green Hills was ever snowed in more than a couple of days). Sure, I remember the great ice storm of (what the hell year was that??) when we didn't have power for days, even in the Belmont area. But that kind of outage is usually pretty rare in that part of town, and buying up the goods every time snow is forecast is, well, sort of like a Pavlovian dog who doesn't realize it gets shocked every time it reaches for a treat.

Greeks also have this sort of "snow hysteria", which actually isn't limited to snow but inclement weather of any kind. I have a bit of an understanding why this is now, since Greece is traditionally the land of sun and sea, and seriously, they don't experience a whole lot of bad weather. When we lived on the island of Kos, I'd say we had maybe two months of winter that you could actually consider moderately cold (almost never getting to freezing temperatures) and overall I'd say sunny weather at least 300 days of the year. On Mt. Olympus it got cold, and we had a couple of big snows, but you still had predominantly sunny weather there. Nashville summers were always filled with afternoon storms, but here, no matter where you live, a summer rain shower seems fairly rare, which is why, I suppose, the Greek word for summer literally translates to "good weather".

Still, I can't help being a bit disappointed, and hoping perhaps a thin blanket of snow will fall overnight. Practically speaking, I find snow to be a pain in the ass (if there is a millimeter of ice, I will find a way to slip on it), but the child inside me still reacts with awe and wonder at the sight of snow. I suppose when you come from a region of the U.S. that doesn't spend the winter encased in snow, you always feel that way.

There is some hope yet, as the winter is still young, and we all know February can be a snowy month.