The perils of ice from above!

My father told me that he remembered from his time as a student in Sweden the concern for winter danger from above. Emily Cotton, a fellow Concord resident who is studying in Sweden, has noted the same concern on her blog, nordic adventures. In Concord there isn't the same concern for falling ice cycles (or rather icicles....I am still fixated on bicycles...well that's my excuse for writing about falling ice cycles).

Here you can see some yellow and red poles warning you to stay clear while the man clears the ice off the roof of a school. The building behind him is our apartment building.

The quiet, neat building in the picture at the top is the law school. It looks very peaceful! And look at all the ice cycles lined up outside.

In Finland they refer to the temperature as being either lämmintä or pakkasta as in:

Tänään on +25 C lämmintä.

or in the winter

Tänään on -23 C pakkasta.

Pakkasta means frost so the headline in the English language paper, Helsinki Times reads "Record-long frosts hit Finland this winter". When I think frost I think of the pretty white mist on the grass that could threaten the strawberry patch. Here, frost means something else entirely.

And, as indicated by the headline we are indeed fortunate to be here in a record breaking winter!
As written in the Helsinki Times, "Turku is also set to break a new record today as the city struggles through a forty-third day of frost. Turku's previous record from 1986 was 42.5 days."