Gla-gla-gla

The world from my window today

The French expression for "Brrrrrr...." is "gla-gla-gla." It's an utterance I've never adopted -- would you want to say "gla-gla-gla" if you were freezing, as we are right now in Aveyron?

I was just wondering how other non-native French speakers feel about "gla-gla-gla." For me it somehow doesn't cut it.

Brrrrr...I do like snow, but there is something ominous about this cold snap and its fine flakes that are already starting to form drifts. As I write, half of our deck is totally visible; the other half has accumulated all of the snow. There's a chilly wind factor going on here -- a definite sign that this is not your typical peaceful snowfall.

Last night the snow stopped around midnight and it wasn't snowing in the morning, but the sky had that dull grey look to it that cold (that was a typo, but it is so Freudian, I'm keeping it!) me there was more to come. I was right. We will see what tomorrow brings!

Alerte orange

Will my village look like this tomorrow morning...

...or like this?

With an "alerte orange" announced for a whole lot of French départements, I'm expecting plenty of snowy blogs this weekend. According to Météo France, the orange part of France below needs to be "very vigilant" about snow and black ice for at least the next 24 hours:


That's an awful lot of France, despite the tiny picture that I don't feel like resizing.

Say no more, say no more! If I'm lucky, I can blog about the snow all weekend!

The calm after the storm

(All photos by Thierry Jouanneteau. Click on them to enlarge.)

I imagine everybody in the expat blogging circles is posting about the storm that hit France yesterday. Here in our part of Aveyron, we experienced a mix of rain, flooding and windstorms followed by a blizzard, leaving in their wake surreal scenes like the one above.

The French media says that 1.7 million homes lost power during yesterday's storm. All trains in and out of Rodez were cancelled. Here in Aveyron, the papers say the lights went out in 17,000 homes at about 6pm yesterday. I noticed the lights flicker at precisely that time...there but for the grace of God...

My husband and I actually had braved the elements Saturday afternoon and gone into Rodez, not really knowing that roof tiles and even major hunks of scaffolding from the cathedral were flying around the city. The BBC reports:

"Another reader, Simon Ritchie, witnessed the damage wrought by the storm in the French town of Rodez.

'This morning, I awoke to the sound of very strong winds and lashing rain or hail,' he said.

'I looked out of my kitchen's skylight window to see scaffolding and sheets or corrugated iron blowing of the adjacent cathedral. One such sheet blew about 50 yards from the tower and landed on a car below, smashing it in completely.'

'People were screaming on the street below, and bits of masonry and scaffolding continued to fall,' he added.

We drove home from town in blizzard conditions, still with no real knowledge of everything that had been happening on le piton, as the town center of Rodez is called.


This morning, things looked so peaceful in our area that no one would have suspected that snow had been whipping vertically against village homes and buildings throughout the previous afternoon.


We didn't get the worst of this storm. We were lucky.

Retour de saison

After an unseasonably warm and dry February, winter made a comeback last week.

My daughters found themselves sprinkled with snow as they went back to school after the two-week winter holiday; my colleagues and I all bundled up at work as suddenly the heating system didn't quite keep us warm enough.


I've experienced this retour de saison many times in March. Just two years ago, it was also snowing during the first week of the month. And last year we fretted about making it up to Clermont-Ferrand to see Michel Polnareff in concert because it was snowing all over the area on March 19th.

I also remember one year when we had a huge snowfall on Easter Monday -- about a foot here in the Rodez area and at least three feet on the Aubrac mountains.

Winter lingers in Aveyron.

(Photos courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)