Forest Hills, NY, in 2001. taken with a disposable camera.
i was browsing through some old (manual) photos, and found a few photos of ari’s old apartment buried under snow. well… not exactly buried. i was exaggerating.
i used to hate this weather… snow, chill, brr. but now, after spending nearly three years back in the tropical weather, oooh…how i miss the snow! it’s always pretty… although it only lasts during the storm and for the first two hours after the storm. after that, the snow turns gray, slushy and icy.
classes get canceled. although usually, work goes on. no day off. walking around with wet pants and boots, shoveling the stairs, spreading the salt, slipping and falling on the way to work (or school)… heh heh heh.
during the winter holiday in 1993, i got into a small bike accident, and i sprained my right ankle. it swell up to the size of the fist. big fist, not my fist. then, the big 1993 snow storm came… i was still a college freshman in a university in Pennsylvania and my dorm was located on the top of a steep hill. my first class on that semester was Physics, and the auditorium where the class is held is on the bottom of the hill.
the snow piled way above my head, the shoveled sidewalk was so icy, and there was no stairs… it was just a 45 degrees icy sloped sidewalk from my dorm all the way to the Physics building. i arrived 15 minutes late to class, since i kept falling, twisting my ankle over and over again on the way down, and had a hard time getting up. it was painful and embarrassing all at the same time.
during lunch, i went to the infirmary and asked for crutches immediately. cursed the snow and the god of snow (if that exists), swearing on how i hate snow… but now, i miss the snow.
New York City was much flatter, at least the area where i lived and work. so, slipping doesn’t happen as often (unless the wind is being violent, which happens a lot in NYC due to the wind tunnel effect between the buildings). so it was more tolerable.
this is how the front of ari’s apartment look like in one morning at the end of a snow storm. the pile on the right is frozen garbage.
even garbage looks much prettier when it’s frozen and covered with snow.