These came out a bit darker than expected, due to my crummy cellphone camera. Still, Stockholm can be really beautiful at this time of year. Here are some pictures of the suburb where I live:

yuck! more snow.

We had our first now this year and i really hope it will be the last time, traffic jams everywhere 

i hate that coldness, i really wish it was summer again 

Ahh snow!  My 17yr old son leaves for Germany in three days and do you think I can find clothes warm enough to withstand a European winter?  Not a chance of it.  He will be living with a German family for a month before making a short tour with his classmates and German teacher.  I am hoping the host mother will take him to the relevant shops and show him what to buy.  It's the shoes that concern me the most.  

To those of us who only see snow on Xmas cards it all looks very pretty indeed but I do have memories of how inconvenient it was to get to work when the roads were full of dirty slushy snow and the day after when it had frozen into ice and the water pipes were frozen solid in the walls.  

Originally Posted By markornikov (3 DEC 2012 7:43am)

yuck! more snow.

We had our first now this year and i really hope it will be the last time, traffic jams everywhere 

Snow is really only bad when there is a whole lot of it, when the wind blows, or when the temperature is very near the freezing point. That is when the snow becomes heavy, and when you get the nasty ice-spots. Currently it is about -10C here in Stockholm, which is cold, but it also means that we don't have many of the winter-related issues. It is also quite easy to wear the right clothes for this weather. 

In fact, the conditions have been ideal here. There are only a couple of cm worth of snow, and there were no heavy snowfalls. Temperatures have also stayed at a near perfect level all the time. I am a bit worried about today though, there might be some heavy snowfall towards lunch time. 

Originally Posted By Caroline (3 DEC 2012 2:58pm)

Ahh snow!  My 17yr old son leaves for Germany in three days and do you think I can find clothes warm enough to withstand a European winter?  Not a chance of it.  He will be living with a German family for a month before making a short tour with his classmates and German teacher.  I am hoping the host mother will take him to the relevant shops and show him what to buy.  It's the shoes that concern me the most.  

 

To those of us who only see snow on Xmas cards it all looks very pretty indeed but I do have memories of how inconvenient it was to get to work when the roads were full of dirty slushy snow and the day after when it had frozen into ice and the water pipes were frozen solid in the walls.  

Germany is not all that bad right now. According to a weather map I just looked at, their temperature is right around 0, and they don't have a lot of snow to deal with. But hopefully they'll get him to buy a proper winter jacket, it might be needed later.

Proper winter shoes can be expensive though. I'm personally just cheaping out on those and instead wear an extra pair of socks when it gets too cold. 

Here we are used to temperatures of down to about -25C, so luckily we don't have to deal with freezing pipes. 

The frozen pipes memory is from my childhood when we lived in a very old house in UK that had lead plumbing.  I lived on the west coast and we got our weather from the jet stream and the Irish Sea. 

My children have grown up basically wearing shorts and flip-flops all year round.  When it gets cold here (average day temp in winter is 15C) they wear jeans and a jumper.  We don't own coats or scarves or gloves etc, just jackets which are seldom worn.  I have bought him a ski jacket and a pair of waterproof sneakers/trainers from the ski shop.  But I've just remembered he will need gloves too.    We're finding it difficult to imagine it being so much colder than we know.

Your pictures are lovely, Fnord.  We had a heavy snowfall that came with the northeaster that arrived just after hurricane Sandy, but we've been having spring-like temperatures lately.

Im jealous. I cant wait to get some snow and cooler temps here. Its been more spring like than anything and I dont like it, I mean I like spring when it actually IS spring. :\

 Very pretty pics.

Originally Posted By Caroline (4 DEC 2012 3:44am)

My children have grown up basically wearing shorts and flip-flops all year round.  When it gets cold here (average day temp in winter is 15C) they wear jeans and a jumper.  We don't own coats or scarves or gloves etc, just jackets which are seldom worn.  I have bought him a ski jacket and a pair of waterproof sneakers/trainers from the ski shop.  But I've just remembered he will need gloves too.    We're finding it difficult to imagine it being so much colder than we know.

I think he'll cope. If nothing else he will get a reminder about the need for warm clothes as all the clothes stores will start selling winter clothes, and even street vendors will try to sell thinks like gloves & toques/beanies (bobcaps) as soon as it starts getting a bit colder. 

And by the way, he should be glad that he is not here right now. I just got snowed in

(Again, photo is darker than real life. You do see a lot further in this photo than you do in real life though).

That water in the third photo looks awfully cold.  And the last photo of the parking lot reminds me of the scene in Fargo.

Originally Posted By anthony (7 DEC 2012 3:13pm)

That water in the third photo looks awfully cold.  And the last photo of the parking lot reminds me of the scene in Fargo.

You should have seen how it was later that day. It just kept on snowing and snowing, and in the end the parking spots on that parking lot became inaccessible, and people were unable to park their cars, or get their cars out of the parking lot. 

It was not that bad on the day that I snapped those photos. Only about -10C, which is nothing unusual for this region. This weekend was really cold though. I went a bit further south during the city where my relatives on my mother's side of the family come from, and temperatures were, during Sunday near -20C. Had it not been for the open stores, that town would have felt like a ghost town that day, as most people refrained from going out, unless they absolutely had to. 

Beautiful pics! Would NOT want to be snowed in, though.