There is no winter without snow

 

Il n'est pas d'hiver sans neige, de printemps sans soleil, et de joie sans être partagée // There is no winter without snow, no spring without sun, and no joy without being shared

While the Canary Islands are being slowly getting covered by a thin reddish layer of calima dust, Moscow is blanketed by a record-breaking layer of snow. My sister is sending me snowy pics of the beautiful, if very cold, winter they are having. 

Some of the photos show a small boat on the river Moscow. It stayed there for a few months already, caught in the ice by the first big frost. Now, with all the snow around it, it positively looks like something that belongs to a book on polar exploration. 

The phrase above is a Serbian proverb. Going by it, I didn't have a single winter in the last few years, if we discount the snow on Teide. No shortage of sun, though.

quatre ans onze mois et deux jours

Il plut pendant quatre ans onze mois et deux jours //
It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days

Yesterday, all of the Canary Islands were expecting a rain - nay, a deluge of biblical proportions - to happen today. The weather warning was issued, and everybody was advised to take various measures of self protection. It being 2020, the warning was taken quite seriously. The rain was supposed to fall with the maximum force between nine in the morning and midday.

It is now 1 pm. I haven't seen any rain yet, although I am told it drizzled some early in the morning.

Anyway. The quote in the caption is from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and it is the first thing that comes to my mind whenever Big Rain is mentioned.

The illustration is not, of course, related to the Márquez's epic. It refers to one of the episodes of our life on Fuerteventura. 

The ground level of the development in which we lived was, and still is, I imagine, about a metre lower than the level of the street behind it. I am not sure what is the reason for that, some of those unfathomable architectural decisions or plain stupidity. Anyway, when there was no rain - which is almost 100% of time of Fuerteventura - it didn't matter. But one day it suddenly did. A Big Rain came our way and it kept raining hard for a few hours, well into the night. The little passages within the development were flooded. The underground parking was flooded. The water level was just a couple of centimeters below the ground floor level of the houses. Our manager, who lived onsite, was running around in her wellies (pictured) trying to figure out what to do. Fortunately, her husband was a trained diver, and he passed in front of our houses with all his diving gear, on his way to fix the pump which was there for just such an occasion, but not working properly. He fixed it, of course, and it all ended relatively well.

Médicament

Une cuiller de sucre aide à avaler le médicament //
A spoonful of sugar helps swallow the medicine

Today’s prompt (I generated a list of prompts for myself, they can be found here) is “medicine”, médicament in French. In search of a good phrase to illustrate, I found the quote above in a supplement of Le Figaro.

Of course, it is a translation of “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.

Incidentally, we have severe weather warning here in the Canaries. Looks like Mary Poppins having certain difficulties keeping her hat on.

Mets ton bonnet!

Mets ton bonnet, tu vas attraper froid! // Put your hat on, you are going to catch cold!

Today’s phrase of the day is the wintry battle cry of all Russian moms and grannies — except it is in French. «Надень шапку, простудишься!» accompanied all our attempts to go out without a hat from September to May, roughly.

Pictures related to cats, hats and winter @ Adobe Stock.

Je n’aime pas conduire

Je n’aime pas conduire quand il neige // I don’t like to drive when it snows

That.

Transparent Language’s word of the day keeps turning to be wintry. And the combination of “snow” and “driving” in one sentence made me remember this particular bit of the road leading to the house where we lived in Finland. A few postboxes, little bridge, sharp turn left, then right and a steepish shortish up. I disliked driving this bit even in summer, but in winter I had to steel myself every time it was coming up.

Pictures related to winter, snow and Finland @ Shutterstock.