Hello Internet! I have missed you a lot!

[quarter_to_five]

Er, that wish for snow...? So it turned out to be the worst snow storm since 1873, apparently. (it's snowed in Cairo and Saudi Arabia. We got something over 50cm. Two weeks ago it was pushing 35 Celsius.) It's been somewhat upward of 24 hours without power, and still no internet, tv, or phone. My father dug out an old tiny battery operated radio, and batteries. (My father: Currently he most vindicated man on earth.) All roads into the city are closed, and most of the roads inside the city are impassable. (My street is completely closed due to about a dozen fallen trees and a downed power line.) This kind of thing DOES NOT HAPPEN HERE!

So I did the only reasonable thing, which was to get a bad case of cabin fever, hike to the train station and catch the special train to Tel Aviv, the encouragingly Ottoman-era railway now being the only connection with the outside world. Also, free train ride! And it's a pictureaque route even on a non-historic-snow-event day, so win. Only question now is how long it will take to get there. And how long before I can actually get back to Jerusalem.

Train has wifi, so I feel like it was the right decision.

Comments

[wendelah1]

Wow. That's pretty shocking. Your city is not used to that kind of snowfall so of course you don't have the infrastructure to cope.

I kind of know how this is because Los Angeles falls apart whenever it rains because no one here can drive in a storm without getting into a car crash.

[quarter_to_five]

Yeah, on the one hand, there's really no sense having infrastructure in place for once-a-century events. OTOH, that's cold comfort to people trapped and freezing at home RIGHT NOW.(with small children or elderly people...) with no electricity for 40 hours (some parts of my neighbourhood still don't have power.) We seem to have gotten lucky, because my parents apartment is ground floor and kind of tucked back against the hill, so it never really got cold, to a surprising degree. Maybe the snow was insulating?

[wendelah1]

Snow can be insulating. Now I am worried for the old people who are trapped and ugh, this is scary.

[quarter_to_five]

The death toll has been fairly low so far (but extremely unpleasant, including a baby burned to death by a heater and two Bedouin teens who've been missing for three days now in a very flash-flood prone area) but there's grim suspicions that it will rise. Yeah, as the novelty wears off it gets more unpleasant. The university just forwarded a request from city hall for volunteers, so now I feel a bit guilty that I got out of the city. Oh well, i'll head back tommorow if the road is open.

[wendelah1]

I'm looking at the pictures on Times of Israel. It's unreal.

[cloudsinvenice]

Good grief! Here we're more likely to have snow, but our infrastructure is shambolic, and a few years ago a major freeze caused chaos with a lot of people losing power, failure to grit the roads adequately, lots of elderly people, in particular, getting injured or marooned in their houses... I can only imagine the scale of the problems there, with an understandable lack of infrastructure altogether for such an unlikely situation.

Thank goodness for wifi on trains...!

[quarter_to_five]

There's always a bit of chaos and school cancelled (up to and including university finals) and that sort of thing when it snows...but it's usually for a day or two and truth be told *most* things kind of keep functioning, we just sort of pretend they aren't. This is on a whole different scale alltogether. The city was genuinely paralyzed - no getting in, no getting out, no getting around, power half-gone, nothing open except hospitals. It was surreal.

(It would be kind of cool if it was all healthy, young people with adequately insulated homes, but of course it's not.)