Oh Winter How I Miss Thee

Oh my, Malaysia is such a hot country, I almost forgot that I used to live in a place where it's cold 7 months of the year. A place where snow could fall even in May, and rain is like a mist spray to the face.

Ann Arbor, Michigan would rank as one of my favorite places to live over in the States. There's hardly any serious crime, the traffic isn't that bad, public transport is efficient enough to take me where I want to go. Everyone's friendly and welcoming, and the ethnic diversity is such that people who are racists are a minority.

One of the things I miss most about living in Ann Arbor, or a four-season location for that matter, is the snow. Here in Malaysia, people have to pay to get to experience snow. Actually not even snow, but fake snow. Back in Michigan, I remember when I used to be so excited over the first snowfall of every year, and getting sick of snow after two weeks. Back then I took snow for granted, especially my first two years of living abroad, until my third year when I first took up snowboarding. The wintersport pastime made me appreciate snow much more during my last few years, and now that I live in a country where snow is almost impossible to be found falling from the sky, I miss the powdery icy cold hexagonal minute microscopic crystal precipitation even more.

Photo above was taken during a trip back from Indianhead Mountain, where I spent a weekend snowboarding with my friends. I was standing on the shores of Lake Michigan which was frozen and covered in a thick layer of snow such that the boundary between the shore and the lake was invisible. At the time, the temperature was not that cold, probably around -1 or -2 Celsius, so I was able to stand outside without a winter jacket.

Some of you might've seen this photo of me before in another post. This was taken when I went snowboarding on Mt. Breckenridge in Colorado, winter of 2004. I was lucky that day to get to borrow a snowboard instead of renting one, which would cost me more than a day's worth of decent meals.

My fifth trip to Chicago was during winter of 2007, and it was my last Spring Break trip with my good friends Kristen, Cassie and Ivan. This photo might probably be my last photo with the Chicago skyline, taken in front of Adler Planetarium.

Oh, and when you live in a country with an Equatorial climate, you don't get to see this phenomenon happening:

 

Grass and trees encased in ice. What happened was that it was raining the night before, then somehow the temperature dropped such that it became cold enough to freeze everything that was wet or covered in water. That morning I woke up to a crystallized icy wonderland, almost everything that was out there was encased in ice, the result of a freezing rain - something that I probably will not get to experience here in Malaysia.

 

Frozen berries!

And icicles everywhere.

Oh winter. How I miss thee.

-ihsankhairir-

Disclaimer: All photos were taken by ihsankhairir or taken by someone else using ihsankhairir's camera.