Britain's Blizzard... or Brizzard?

Western Europe's and Britain's recent snowpocalypse and the total chaos it caused over the weekend reminded me of an experience similar to that country's recent wintry woes.

While I was working in the dark world of tobacco advertising, I was sent on a business trip to Bristol with a few colleagues to make a few presentations. We managed to line up the trip for a Thursday, so we could spend the weekend in London.

We arrived at Luton Airport on Thursday morning to chilly, soggy weather – nothing unseasonable. This weather held up through the two-hour drive to Bristol and an entire day of meetings, a client dinner, and an evening of refinements on the presentation.

The next morning, I groggily awoke and parted the curtains.

Bristol gets a real taste of winter.  

The city was blanketed with a few inches of snow, which was still coming down. As I sipped my third coffee in the hotel restaurant, I watched people slip and slide through the snow as they stared at the winter wonderland around them. Cars fishtailed as they turned, slid as they hit the brakes, and spun their wheels with their feeble all-weather tires.

For Bristol, it was a snow day. The city's authorities told everyone to stay home. The trams stopped running. The client's office was closed. We held the client presentation huddled on couches around my lap top on a coffee table in the hotel bar for the two clients who braved the snow.

As we drove back to London in a hired car, we saw the first evidence of the existence of snow plows in Britain – the highway was clear, though there were few other cars enjoying the salted and cleared the road.

All weekend in London, the snow continued to fall. I went spent an afternoon in the Tate Modern, so my shoes could warm up and dry out. I went from pub to cozy pub with a Londoner friend, where other Londoners had escaped to drink liquid warmth by the pint. I walked down semi-empty sidewalks and slushy, snowy, unplowed roads. The only places that were reliably open all weekend were the Indian restaurants, the pubs, and curiously, the White Chapel Market.

By Sunday, we arrived to the airport hoping the Brits had learned to handle the snow, we were somewhat disappointed. The snowplows were struggling to keep the snow off the runways, delaying flights. The airport personnel let us and our fellow passengers outside onto the tarmac, unaware the flight crew was still de-icing the plane. We shivered outside in the wind and snow, waiting to be admitted onto the airplane. When the airplane took to the air, I clapped and a few other passengers joined in. We had escaped.

Spending a weekend in Britain during a snowfall, or "snowstorm" as they call it, is like living through the first day of snow in Canada – drivers forget how to drive, snowplows take a while to get to the streets, people discover they haven't put on their snow tires.

In some countries over here, a serious snowfall comes once every few years, so they're institutionally unprepared for it and most people aren't sure how the handle the snow. It's like our first snow of the winter on a near-collapse-of-society level.

Canadians – and some hearty American states – have the advantage of having a few more snowfalls to deal with throughout the year, by which time we've forgotten how to deal with snow again and we're all clueless about how to drive, walk, breath, et cetera. 

That being said, there are few better places to spend a snowstorm than in a cozy pub in England.

A Day Over in Hanover

Whenever we got lost in Hanover,
we looked for the "Witch Church' to orient ourselves.

Cities in Northern Germany are studies in contradictions.

Bremen is a blue-collared, working class city, where beer brewers and factory workers rub shoulders with students and artists. That strange mixture gives you a city that's grounded and unpretentious, yet still artistic and surprising. My kind of city.

Hamburg is a sprawl of sailors, refugees, drifters, musicians, bankers, ship owners, and old money at the mouth of the Elbe River. It's a city of work ethic and debauchery, with a worldliness that accepts everything and anything, because there are better things to do than judge someone for who they are or what they do – like make money or party.

To the south of these fine towns is Hanover, a mid-sized city that's a little tougher to pin down.

Every region in Germany speaks German a little different, from the rocks-in-your-mouth dialect in Cologne to the Bavarians' take on the language, which the rest of Germany unjustifiably snickers at. I've been told the German that Hanoverians speak is as close as you can get to the original High German. I'm no expert, but the German I heard in Hanover was definitely clearer and easier to understand for the slow-learning, novice German-speaker.

Hanover is a city that wears its white collar stiffly, but unlike other German cities, Hanover is not a city of bankers or chemists or engineers. It's a city of culture. There are theatres everywhere, an opera house with a packed schedule, and enough museums and art galleries to please every artistic inclination.

And yet, our only full day in the city was a Monday, so every museum in the city was closed. The Sprengel and its collection of 20th centuries masterpieces was off limits. The Kestnergesellschaft was a no go. The edgy, ultra-modern KUBUS was not edgy enough to be not closed for the day.

And since this is February, the Botanical Gardens and the gardens around the Schloss Herrenhaus would have been a dreary, cold walks. The giant forest in the middle of the city would have been nice, but barren. 

But this is turning into a blog post about what we didn't do, let's get down to what we did do.

We wandered around Hanover's lovely old town. We ate pizza at an amazing Italian place – by the way, the best Italian food I've eaten has been at Italian-owned restaurants in Germany, not tourist traps in Italy. We froze walking around the old city hall and the local man-made lake. We warmed up over kaffee and kuchen. We even did a little window shopping.

Clearly visiting on a Museum Monday in February meant what we didn't get a complete sense of the city's culture or its big cityforest. So a return trip with better weather on any day other than a Monday might in order. Even with 36 hours in the city, Hanover showed it's depth, we just need to time it better.

"Papers, Please"

Some, but not all, of my papers. In Germany, you are nothing without your papers.
You need papers to do stuff and you get papers for doing stuff.
Save them all. 

Long ago there was blog that showed flat lay photos of objects people would grab from their home if it was on fire. They photographed their most important, prized possessions – the things they couldn't live without. 

They were mostly designers, so the items they'd save were typically designer-ish: sunglasses, laptops, and hard drives. An awful lot of handguns appeared in the careful arrangements because, well, it was an American blog.

Put in the same situation in Germany, I would grab people before possessions and then I would grab my papers, all my important papers, because you are nobody in Germany without your papers.

When you arrive to Germany, you must register at the city's civil office. They give you a paper, an Anmeldung, that says you do indeed live where you say you live. You will need this for everything. If you lose it, no one will believe you exist, because they don't know if you really have a home. There's no paper to prove it.

You will sign a contract at your job. You must hold on to this. Your landlord will want to see it. And to get your Anmeldung, your landlord must give you a copy of your rental agreement. So, you can't get one paper without the other paper. 

You will show most of these papers when you open a bank account – you won't remember which papers you need, so you will bring them all to the bank, just in case. 

You will need the bank account to get paid by your job and pay your landlord. You will get papers from both: payslips and invoices. You must save these papers to prove people pay you and that you pay people. You may need your bank papers for later, but you don't know for what, so you keep them just in case the need arises.

As you bank with your bank, they will print out records of your transactions and mail them to you. You should keep those papers too, because, well, you might need them when someone official asks for them.

Did you keep those pay slips I mentioned earlier? Good. You need those papers to file your income tax statement. You will need more papers for your taxes, like receipts, statements, and bills of sale. 

After you file your taxes, they will send you a statement stating what they did with your tax papers. Keep that paper too. You should also keep a paper copy of your original tax return, just in case someone official asks for it. 

All these papers go somewhere. A box or a binder or somewhere safe. Because if you move, you will need to prove it with papers at the civil office and update your Anmeldung (remember that important piece of paper?), after you get new contract papers from your landlord.

If you renew your work permit, you need to go to the Pension Office and show a bunch of your papers to get another piece of paper that proves you've been paying into the pension fund. If you're like me, and they recorded you as a woman, they will correct that error in the system and give you a piece of paper saying that a piece of paper has been sent to someone upstairs who will correct that error in the records.

If you lose your job, you will go to the job agency and register as a jobseeker. In order to do this, you will need most of your papers. Make sure you have every single one of those papers. Your EU Blue Card comes with a piece of paper too big to fit in your wallet. It stays at home safe. You might forget that piece of paper and will have to return the next day with all your papers and that little piece of paper to get registered, for which you are given another piece of paper, for your records.

And so, if I am unlucky enough to see my home burn down, I will get everyone out and then run back into the inferno to rescue my papers, because what good is a laptop, disk drive, sunglasses, or a handgun if I don't have my papers in Germany.