Thanks to last weekend's cold snap, today's temperature of 9C seems positively balmy. Most of the leaves on the trees came down after two days of hard frost -- a steady drizzle that burst into a shower everywhere birds landed on branches. Today the resisters (leaves, that is) are being efficiently vacuumed into the air by a high wind.
Munich seems to get high winds fairly regularly, which was a bit disconcerting for the first couple of months. In Canada --at least in my experience -- winds like this are harbringers of some major climactic event, like a violent thunderstorm or a blizzard, and at first I would unconsciously brace myself everytime it happened. However, here the wind just huffs and puffs in an "I'll blow your house down" kind of way, and then stops. That's not to say we don't get some doozy storms here, but I'm assuming that those come up from the south, over the alps from Italy; there's a definite latin temperament to the ones I've witnessed so far. A calm day, and suddenly some dark clouds overhead; a gale-force wind bursts into drenching horizontal rain without much warning, and just as suddenly, it's over and the sun breaks out. All very exciting for the short while it lasts, but it leaves you wondering, "what was THAT all about?"
While we're on the subject of weather ("hello, I'm Canadian"), I came across a blog today based out of Inuvik, in the far, far north. Martin of Eclectic Blogs bundled up in the -17C weather and took advantage of 4 hours of sunshine to take some pictures of a (as he describes it) "colourful fall day". Gorgeous. You can almost feel the vastness and silence of the place, well except maybe for the snowmobiles and bush planes buzzing around like annoying mosquitos, and the crunchy snow underfoot. Now that's what I call weather.
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