Snow!

We’ve got ourselves some snow! It makes me feel right at home. I just had my FIL on the line, and I could hear his teeth chatter through the line. No, let’s rephrase that, I heard his teeth clapper. It’s cold in Beirut, 5 degrees outside, but up in the mountains where he is staying, it’s freezing. They got over 50 centimeters of snow yesterday, and today he could not get down to Beirut because the roads are closed. What’s more, he hasn’t had electricity since yesterday afternoon either. Now he’s got a chimney, and is happily stoking up the fireplace, but I doubt many of his neighbors have that luxury.

A huge snowstorm continued to hit Lebanon Thursday, isolating villages and towns and causing widespread havoc on roads with temperatures reaching below zero in many areas, including the capital.Many villages and towns at an altitude of 600 meters were blanketed by snow that also left thousands of people without power or telephone lines. (An Nahar)

The electricity situation has been shaky lately, to say the least, and this storm is not exactly helping matters much. I haven’t received much electricity today either, and that's in the heart of Beirut. The generator is groaning under the demand of the building. Every time someone gets into the elevator, everyone’s lights dim. If this continues, we’ll have to ration the generator as well.
And then it will be like in the old days, ‘el iyem min zamen’. Then we had to tell dinner guests at 10:55 PM that they had another 5 minutes left to pack it up and leave with the elevator, or otherwise they’d have to negotiate the 12 flights of stairs in the dark, because the building generator would be turned off at 11:00 PM sharp.

More pictures to come this weekend when I will immerse myself in snow.