If you’d want to know about the weather conditions in any part of the world, you’d find that information easily yourself, I know. So believe me, the last thing I’d like to bore you with are weather reports. But due to unbearable weather conditions one is definitely due.

It’s January and even though they tell me the average temperature in Helsinki should be low enough to turn off the freezer and move its contents to the balcony, it’s so warm that it won’t do to cool the sauna beer. Actually I don’t even care so much for the temperature itself. What hurts is that pathetic amount of white stuff on the ground only meteorologists could call snow cover.

In many respects this is the first winter I have decided to actively embrace the harsh weather of the north, but it turned its back on me. For the first time I’ve changed the summer tires for a pair of these beasts with 240 studs. Then I got myself some seriously practical literature on building wintertime shelters (How to Build an Igloo And Other Snow Shelters). Just in case. But what nailed the last nail into the coffin of my winter plans is skiing. It rained cats and dogs for a whole week after I got a pair of skis. When former miss Finland Ninni Laaksonen enunciated her understanding of the climate change by admitting that she has only seen the headlines bearing these words and that for all she knows it means that it’ll bring us longer and warmer summers, she was painfully right: last year’s summer did stretch all the way into January.

Even ice fishermen who with their Jesus-like craftiness usually somehow manage to walk onto the middle of lakes and sit there the whole day, when for the rest of us there is no ice whatsoever, are not only disappointed with this year’s winter, but warm weather might decimate their ranks this season. Yet what truly speaks of the unbearable conditions is that the guys who thawed their freezers to make the only cross-country skiing track in Finland, and managed to keep it open for the whopping 36 hours, were charging a formidable 8€ for a half kilometer loop. How many visitors they got remained unknown, but I bet it wasn’t crowded.

The only thing that makes this godforsaken snow-free place feel like winter are the measly amounts of sunshine. If I were to ask you how many hours of sun you think the residents of Helsinki could have seen in the whole month of December (assuming that that’s all they wanted to do), what would you say? 80 hours? 60? 40? Wrong! Twenty! Yes, twenty hours spread over 31 days. Most likely I have overslept all that sunshine as I can’t really remember seeing any at all.

But life is getting brighter after all. There’s absurdly more snow in Dubai than there is in the whole of Finland right now, but yesterday was the first time I left the office while it was still light outside–and I leave work at 4.

Mladen