4.02.2006: 'cold snap'

I got a bunch of emails from different folk when Moscow's ridiculously cold weather made international headlines. In reply to those, let me tell you a bit about how it felt to be here at the time.

Even before the really intense weather started, the Russian winter certainly presented some challenges. It does take a while to get 'winter savvy', i.e. to know what you have to do each day to maximise your comfort when the needle starts dipping well below the Big Zero. There have been occasions when I wasn't as well-prepared as I'd thought, and the results have been nasty. The worst of these: a moment of panic in early January, when I came home from school one night without my house keys and thought I might have to spend the night out-of-doors. aarrggghh!!!!

Fortunately I got the keys back from the 'night watchman' (a warmly smiling babushka, who was peering through the front door of the school looking out for me when I turned up just after midnight.) But the temperature was about -10C at the time, and it demonstrated to me that being absent-minded can really bring on the badness in this climate. Had my boss not noticed the keys sitting on my work desk, &/or had the school not had its 24-hour Old Lady Surveillance System in place, then I probably would have spent the night outside - or at least in the corridor of my building. Which could've been a seriously unfun experience.

Overall, though, where low temperatures are concerned you just gradually learn to deal. I won't go into detail here, but there are lots of little things you pick up along the way, clothing combinations you try, mistakes you make and learn from etc. etc.

Also, your perspective changes pretty quickly. Late in December, at the start of our first temperature plunge, there was a day when the thermometer was hovering around -12C. I knew my chores would require me to go schlepping around town that day and I was fairly nervous about it, 'cause twelve below zero was the lowest temperature I'd experienced up to that point. But I went out anyway, and lived through it. Same thing the next day. A few days later we hit -17C, and less than a week after that I felt quite cavalier about another town mission in -11, because I'd dealt with it a few times by then and I knew what to expect and what to do. Since then, there have been plenty of occasions when I've caught myself looking at the thermometer stuck to the wall outside my kitchen window (one of the most useful things in the flat), seeing a minus 5 or a minus 8 and thinking "ooh, look, it's really warmed up now".

All of this does hinge quite heavily on the wind chill factor, though; -12C and still is a whole different skillet of squid to -12C with coastal winds. Fortunately Moscow is an inland, low-lying city where you rarely get much more than a light breeze; there's far less air movement here, for example, than in Sydney. So until the 'cold snap' hit, I wasn't doing it anywhere as hard as I thought I would be, having previously tried to imagine what -12 would be like from a Sydney-sider's point of view. I also remembered standing on top of Mt. Rigi near Lucerne in 2002, in temperatures just a few degrees below zero, and feeling my head spin and my ears begin to ache. But - stupid - that was on top of a mountain! Should've known it wouldn't be quite the same in a city where the highest point of elevation is about 200 metres above sea level.

But anyway, on to the real question: what do you do when you have to be at work in two hours and the temperature outside your flat is -27C? Well, for a start, you don't sit back and wait for your employer to help you.

Let me explain that: soon after arriving in Moscow, I found out that the heating system for private homes consists of hot water pipes that run through buildings and flats. The water is heated by coal fires at a central reservoir (apparently a pretty standard deal in Russia and eastern Europe). When I realised this would be our only protection from the Moscow winter ... well, it concerned me a little! So I asked around to find out what to do when the frosts came. I was re-assured by everyone I spoke to that Moscow flats remain warm'n'toasty throughout the colder months of the year, and that I shouldn't worry. A few people suggested that I might need some special insulation tape to cover the windows and seal myself in. But in a rented property this was something the landlord would take care of, I was told. So again, not a cause for great concern.

Of course I mentioned this to the school, who said I should do nothing and let them take care of it. But they never bothered to actually send someone around and seal up the windows. As a result, it was well below freezing point inside our flat during the cold snap. I could tell, 'cause when I tried to seal the windows with normal packing tape my hands froze up in the attempt. Also, within a few hours, a thick layer of ice had formed on the tape.

So here I was, swaddled in five or six layers of clothing (one of them a poncho), with a fat woolly scarf tied preposterously around my waist to guard against updrafts, my hands bleeding from the cold, barely able to type as icy downdrafts coursed over my fingers, which were stinging as though I'd slashed them repeatedly with a serrated knife and and rubbed lemon juice into the wounds. But this was really a problem with my accommodation more than with the climate itself, and other ex-pats had exactly the same experience. Meanwhile, nearly all the locals were wise to the insulation trick and therefore remained warm and snug.

The problem was finally seen to after my school administrator Giorgy got on the 'phone to Central Office and started yelling at people on my behalf. My limited Russian didn't serve me too well in interpreting what I heard of that conversation, but the general message seemed to be "My teachers can't work like this - fix it NOW!" Giorgy's daughter used to be the school director; I don't know how much weight that carries exactly, but we had service from the maintenance department the next day. A huge, burly, incessantly cheerful guy called Sergei came around and taped up everything while I made him cups of coffee, and then he proudly presented me with a heater before he left. From that point onwards, my flat was utterly warm and cosy.

As far as the actual weather itself goes ... well, it was scary, but also fun.

I say "scary" because, once we went below -20C, I didn't know how or even if I'd cope. Even the locals were starting to worry. This was the most prolonged period of super-freezy weather the city had experienced since 1978. While we were in the thick of it, there were all kinds of panicked predictions flying around; "it's going to hit minus 40 this weekend!", you'd hear people say. The lowest amateur forecast I heard was -50C, which was entirely untrue of course (for Moscow at any rate, if not for Siberia, where it got down to about minus 53). But I was loathe to trust my own judgement over that of the locals, so I worried that there might come a point where my body and my clothes simply wouldn't stand up to the onslaught.

This didn't happen. And nor did the other thing I'd been waiting for: the point in time where Anthony says to himself "Okay, Russian winter, you got me. This IS worse than summer in Sydney." It never came to that. So, ask me which is scarier: -25C or +45C? Answer: for me, there's no comparison. Minus 25 can definitely hurt, but I'll take it over +45 any day of the week!

And the "fun" part of -25C? Well, I'd always hoped that, by coming here, I'd get to live through a truly kickarse winter. So I'm pleased to have had that wish granted. There was part of me that felt a kind of awe and admiration for the intensity of it all, and there was also a certain perverse glee that came from being outside in such extreme conditions. Plus, never having experienced this kind of climate before, it was all a bit of an adventure. I definitely felt a sense of mounting anticipation as the evil temperatures approached. I was checking the thermometer every time I came home, and there were three consecutive days in a week where I did a little "woohoo, my coldest day ever!" dance by the kitchen window ... only to have the record broken again the following day.

One serious downside of such a cold January, though, was the lack of snow. The white stuff comes down in buckets when you're just a few degrees below zero, but once it starts getting really cold the snow stops. Instead, you just get the occasional bit of falling ice (which can sting), and a ton of frost. I think everyone reading this will know by now just how much I love a good snowfall. When it first arrived way back in October I made some appreciative comments, and people I knew in Moscow responded by telling me that I'd be cursing the stuff within a month or two. I believed them, too. But they were wrong; I still love it, and it's probably the thing I'll miss the most when I leave Russia. (That and my 'teens1' class - more about them in another entry, perhaps.) We had tons of it in December, but in January it basically ceased altogether. It felt kinda surreal for a lad from the Antipodes to be looking out of his kitchen window and thinking "Damn, looks like it's too cold for snow today."

Meanwhile, the fierce weather brought out a softer side of Moscow. The militsia, for example, were instructed not to chase homeless people out of heated buildings (e.g. the Metro stations) as they usually do. They were also given signs to put up in the stations, telling people without a roof of their own where they could go to get shelter for the night. Had it not been for that, the death toll here would've been much higher. These small official mercies added a nice touch of humanity to things - something that's often conspicuous by its absence in this town.

So that was my experience of Russia's coldest winter for 25 years. Of course, the frigid season still has a couple of months to go, and another 'cold snap' is always possible. But I'll be out of town for the next few weeks, and by the time I return the deepest days of winter will be behind us. And I have to say, that thought is almost disappointing.

Lucky I've got so much else to look forward to ...