At final tally, almost a foot of snow fell in Madrid between Thursday and Saturday. Today, the temperature rose to about 37 degrees and the sun came out — but the question now is what does one do with all that snow? If you’re a Madrileño with a top-floor terrace, you shovel it into the street below using your broom and a dust pan, which tends to cause shouting matches with passers-by. This morning, El Pais contained a diagram illustrating how to avoid snowfalls from building cornices. Mostly, people just walk in the middle of the street. Their careful shuffle is a little zombie-like; the car-less thoroughfares, a little apocalyptic.
Snow plows have cleared main streets, but most peripheral arteries are a mixture of snow, slush, dog poop, and downed tree limbs — there’s probably not a tree in Madrid that didn’t lose at least a branch. Volunteers with four wheel drive vehicles are ferrying people to the hospitals, which are otherwise inaccessible.
Tonight’s low will be in the low 20s, tomorrow’s in the teens. Since all that slush is about to become ice, school’s been cancelled at least through Tuesday. The grocery store opened at noon today, but by the time we got there at 12:45, the produce section had already been decimated.
The new joke is that the snow was a government plan to get us all back on lockdown.
Katherine L. Hester 