Snow Day

This morning Ariel and I woke up dark and early at 7:15, ready to get back into our normal daily schedule and work routines. I fully intended to go to the archives and finish work on a carton of documents that I started looking at before the AN closed for the holidays, and I think Ariel was anticipating getting back to her Rosetta Stone program for French and doing stuff around the apartment.

But as the sun slowly began to rise, we noticed something different about the Paris outside our windows. Something white and flaky about it. It was snowing!

In fact, it has literally been snowing nonstop all day long - it's even still snowing now, at 7:10 p.m. almost 11 hours after it started. And what's more, the snow actually started to stick! And from what people tell me, this is not all that common in Paris (at least not anymore - yay global warming).

This is the logic that I then decided to apply to the situation: when I was a child, whenever there was the slightest hint of snow in Monroe - or, more likely, a hint of sleet and slush - school was canceled and students got a play day. I'm a grown up now, according to my marriage license. But I'm still a student. As such, whenever it snows, I should take the day off. Makes sense, right? Right!

Ariel and I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon staying cozy in our apartment, reading and occasionally looking out our windows in awe as the city got colder and colder and whiter and whiter. Then around 3:00, we decided to take a walk and see how things looked. We ended up walking around for a little over an hour, going down to the Seine, walking along the river until we reached Notre Dame, crossing over to Ile de la Cité and meandering for a bit before slowly making our way over to Ile St. Louis, then back across to the Left Bank and home again. It was great. There were at least 1 or 2 inches of snow on the ground, and people were making little snowmen, writing on the snow-covered walls, and having snowball fights everywhere.


In fact, it was one of those moments when it feels like you're walking through a cliché, only totally awesome. I mean, come on: here we were, two young people in love walking through the snow-covered streets of Paris. Just describing it makes me feel like I'm writing a script for a Very Special Valentine's Day Episode of an original Lifetime TV show. But it still might be the best I've had here in Paris so far during this trip. Snow days are always the best days...

Oh, and we took a lot of pictures. Wanna see?