Frío Siberiano

Everyone here is freaking out because it got cold. I guess we do the same thing in the US (I guess they do the same thing everywhere); where I come from it just has to get a lot colder for people to start freaking out. Anyway, I was walking down the sidewalk today, surrounded on all sides by Spanish conversations going on about how cold it is, when loud and clear from the middle of all of it came an American voice saying "You know, it's really not that cold." You probably had to be there, but it made me smile a lot.

And it really is silly how much they are freaking out. In other parts of Europe this cold spell is actually serious and terrible. Here the temperatures are barely below freezing. It snowed a little in some parts of Catalunya and it snowed a little more in the mountains. It didn't snow at all in Barcelona. Ok, maybe a few of the raindrops from this morning were more like snowflakes (more like sleet, really, but close enough), but there's no snow on the ground in the city. My roommate goes to school very slightly outside of Barcelona where, if it snowed at all, it barely snowed, and they cancelled all classes for today. Anyone who had plans to go anywhere this weekend has cancelled those plans: Three different people have told me that it's sort of a third world country here and so you have to be careful when it snows because you could get hurt or stranded or something. La Vanguardia's (the Barcelona paper) website has no fewer than ten links to snow-related stories, plus a snow photo gallery (with a photo of some kids making snow angels in approximately a centimeter of snow). Hilariously, there's also an article about Punxsutawney Phil (la marmota Phil, they call him); I wonder if they always cover Groundhog's Day here or only when they're obsessing about winter.

I realize that by this point it sounds like I'm the one obsessing -- I'm just really amused by it. At 10pm on a Thursday night, there's basically no one out, and the foreigner to Spanish/Catalan ratio is even higher than on a cold rainy Sunday. I feel like kind of a badass for still walking everywhere. No one from here thinks I'm a badass; they just think I'm weird. But in my current state of spending way too much time being a little bit afraid of a bunch of 19-year-olds, I'll take any little bit of (imagined) bad-assery I can get.