Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

Guiyang gets cold in the winter. For the last week or so the temperature's hovered around freezing but it's dropped significantly in the last two days. It's currently 6 AM and I'm sitting in my room drinkingcoffee while the temperature outside is a balmy 25F/-4C. It's supposed to stay like this for the next few days before rising to about 35F/1C by the end of the week. 

I'm from Northern California and spent the last 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, so this kind of cold is absolutely foreign to me. I had to buy a proper winter coat earlier this month.

Despite the cold and the high elevation (1100M/3600FT) it rarely snows here. Yesterday was one of those rare occasions. In the early afternoon I looked out the window and saw this:

It doesn't look like much and it really isn't, but it was cool to see.

I haven't spent much time in the snow, so I suited up and went outside to check it out. I walked out of my residence and saw this:


Yes, it's not that much but it's still fun to see.
I took a walk around the campus. No one is here on the weekends but the foreign teachers and a security guard. It was remarkably quiet save for the crunching of the snow under my shoes. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought that even the sounds of traffic were muted. It was a touch surreal.

The campus Christmas tree.


A walking path around the campus itself. 


Our athletic field with a light dusting of frozen water.




The view from the Christmas tree. You can see the front gate to the school in the distance.

There's more snow in the forecast, and I have to go out today to get some groceries so I'll probably have some time to get more pictures. It's new and novel to me at least, maybe not to my friends from the midwest or the Canadians I work with.

It's probably time to get some boots.

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