It’s snowing here again. We got about 2.5 inches last night (I suppose I should be thinking in cm, but…who cares? 😛 ), and it’s snowed pretty much all day.
I showed my parents last night by turning on my webcam, turning off the lights, and holding my computer out our window on the European 2nd/US 3rd floor.
These are pictures Tom took, mostly out the window of the shared kitchen. He took them at the end of January, but this is basically what the view out of the kitchen bay window looks like now.
I love how smooth the non-iced part of the lake looks. (Left-hand part of picture.) Tom says that that’s caused by a thin layer of water over ice underneath, making the water look smooth and glassy.
Here, the building you can see behind the trees and the lake is GT Lorraine. (Yes, it is one-building small. There are about 200 people total, mostly undergrads, with a few permanent French professors and about two labs worth of grad students doing their PhD here.)
The whole lake is lined with buildings like the ones in the background, which are buildings for various French colleges and universities. (And yes, just like at regular Georgia Tech, you can tell where it is by all the construction. Although in this case the construction is on an environmental school right next door.)
Yep, weird ugly buildings (I think a secondary school) at the other end of the lake too. But also a bus stop, yay! And the lake is icy enough for there to be SNOW ON IT. For me, this is mind-blowing.
❤
Sophia's Travels in France 
So pretty! How are you guys handling the cold?
Heh. By staying indoors? Tom’s shoes are falling apart, so he wears two layers of socks, and two layers of shirts, and his thickest jeans. I finally broke down and asked my parents for money to get him new shoes and some long underwear, so that will be on its way to him this week.
I have a (fairly reasonable) phobia of slipping again on black ice and hurting myself, since I’ve done it twice. But other than that, I’m enjoying getting to know what snow is like, and how there are different types of snow…yesterday when we went to church, there were 2.5 inches of pure powder. Today, some of that has melted or been compacted, and it’s snowing smaller, denser flakes.
I do wish I had friends here to do typical kid-in-snow things: I have never sledded, skiied, or had a snowball fight, and Tom isn’t really able to do any of those things. (I have built a tiny snowman, and made snow angels, but I’d like to do it again in six inches of snow instead of a half inch…)