Chronicles of a winter in Canada - part 1

You can surely find many posts and articles about the winter (in Canada): how to survive winter, how to prepare for your first winter, Canadian winter 101, etc. And by no means this post intends to present a guide or a how to. This is just something I thought I had to write about, since it's my first official (two white Christmas holidays -Utah and Cali- don't count because both times were just for two weeks, with a car and on a holiday mood) and real winter. And by that I mean not the winter we have in Monterrey, with a few weeks days of 0º C and the rest of the season with temperatures around 10º C or more.

So the first snow of the winter 2013 was in November 28th, but it was very light. Little I knew how bad normal this winter was going to be. Normal because last year, the first snow was on Dec 24th, there were very few blizzards, and by March winter was all gone. This time? Well, it's been lots of snow so far. And there's more coming!

Views from my apartment window

Luckily, Canada, unlike the USA, has a great déneigement snow removal service. This, added to Montreal's great STM (public transportation system), helps people continue living their routines, despite the terrible weather conditions.

Winter went on and I had to get used to very cold days, and walking on messy roads and sidewalks (half of the time it was hard to walk on the sidewalk, so we just end up going to the streets instead). I didn't have, yet, appropriate winter boots, nor a warm enough winter jacket, so I had to wear like 3 sweaters plus my jacket in order to kind of tolerate the crazy temperatures.

There's no way your shoes boots won't get wet, so better go for waterproof ones.

I spent Christmas at my roommate's parent's place, 2 hours drive from Montreal. It was good to get out of the city for a few days. Since they are all Québécois, used to this kind of weather, they all decided to go out for a walk (on a day with -15º C!). And wanting to get some fresh air too, I went out with them. Oh boy! it was a bad idea!!

Taken right outside the door, so I was still ok.

As we started walking, my hands, feet and nose started to get colder.

The day they decided to drive us back to Montreal (December 27th), there was a very very bad blizzard (la tempête du siècle, 45cm in one day) and it took us 8 hours to get back. Most of the time, we had to go 20 km/h in the highway and it was twice blocked because of a carambolage multiple crash. Twice the car almost got stuck on the road because of the snow, and a couple of times visibility was almost 0. When we finally arrived in the apartment, the entrance was blocked with snow.

We almost got stuck trying to get back on the highway after this.

The blue lines show where the sidewalk is supposed to be.

This is how I found my room window when I got back.

After that historic storm, there has been more snowfall, but nothing as bad as that one.