Fun with Snow

The Plac Matejki, looking towards the Old City

My colleague Stephanie Jackowska, who is an English Teaching Assistant in Gdańsk, recently wrote a blog post about some of life's little irritations in Poland (see it here.) One of the things she mentioned was the way that snow removal is or is not handled over here.

As I'm writing this, we're in the process of getting what is probably going to turn out to be between 3 and 6 inches (7.5-15cm) of snow, only a few days after we had had a week-long thawing out that pretty much eliminated the snow on the ground. I was hoping that that thaw would prove lasting, because there are a few things that are irritating about snow removal over here.

First, I've noticed that most sidewalks aren't shoveled, and rather than using salt the sidewalks are sanded. So, if it does get above freezing all of that turns into this sandy slush that clings to boots. Coming inside means leaving ugly brown footprints wherever you go and if you haven't banged those boots out thoroughly, you might even leave a puddle behind. In public places where a lot of people are coming in from the snow, this usually means there are ugly brown puddles that pool in low spots in the floor. Other than that, you've got a bunch of brown footprints left on, say, tile floors. To avoid this, many stores will have some poor schlep who's entire job, as far as I can tell, consists of mopping up after each customer enters. 

Many apartment buildings do not have heated hallways, i.e. the individual apartments are heated, but the block itself is not. So a stack of snow usually stays on the roofs of the buildings. It's very pretty, but once things start to thaw that snow has to be cleared somehow lest, you guessed it, the melt should pool and seep under the roof. So during the thaw there were guys on roofs with shovels tossing snow onto the sidewalk below, whilst that section of sidewalk was roped off with somebody down there both spotting for the guy on the roof and warning people. At least in theory that's how it's supposed to work. Sometimes the guy on the roof gets more enthusiastic than his spotter expects him to be, leading said spotter to be whacked in the head by chunks of flying snow.

Freezing rain is really a novelty here. We had such a storm, and nobody here had ever seen anything like it. Apparently none of them spent a winter in Pittsburgh! 

I think that the city fathers are also hoping that the snow ends soon. The newspaper had a story about a month ago about how the city had budgeted 15 million złoty for snow removal, and had about 1 million still on hand in the middle of January. Now I don't know about you, but $5 million seems like a pretty measly budget for an entire winter worth of snow removal for a city of 700,000 people, even accounting for lower salaries here. Sadly, when I asked some people about this state of affairs, they said that that particular story runs in the paper pretty much every year. 

Oh well. At least the Planty look absolutely beautiful with fresh-fallen snow on all the trees.