Once in 2005 or 2006, it was unseasonably warm here in Edmonton and you could see the new foreign students at the U of A going "psshh, winter in Edmonton was supposed to be bad!"... Then the weather changed to like -35 for a week and all the new students looked like they had PTSD. There was a lot of gazing off into the distance, not saying anything. Even my winter coat sorta froze into a me-shaped shell while I was waiting for the bus one day.
My school closed for their first snow day in over a decade last year the day AFTER every other school due to 'icey conditions' because they couldn't clear the snow properly due to all the students being in school the previous day.
Wow, those stories about bus drivers just emoting nonchalantly at waiting commuters while passing them at high speed... in most cities in Poland, they would be busing crucified, possibly literally ('though more likely in-company due to social media pressure), and possibly by their current passengers.
I grew up in the desert. In the forty years I've been alive, there have been two snow days. Both were because small towns at higher altitudes got too much snow to be bussed in, and because those rural kids got the day off everyone got the day off. One of those days, the snow was melted away by noon in the valley. "Snow day."
I was in mountain desert (the Jemez) and that's usually what we saw. Not snow days very often, but quite a few snow delays. We had monsoons in the area so combined with a cold night it could dump a few feet of snow on us, but things would melt pretty quick (off the roads at least, grass and shade have interesting thermodynamics stuff going on) so we'd just wait an hour or two for things to clear up and all the business traffic to thin out because you don't want a busload of kids on an icy mountain road surrounded by commuters.
It's really treated as self-evident when ...no, not at all. Other than Canada's Worst Driver, I haven't seen anyone actually try to explain what goes wrong and what to do about it.
Every December (November this year) in Québec there's a mad dash to get the tires changed when the first snow catches everyone by surprise. There are far far more cars then garages able to change tires.
Few things are as satisfying as chasing down a bus that would otherwise have blown past your stop before you could get to it. You need shoes with good tread if there's any kind of precipitation, though.
Sweet, sweet Canadian tears, delicious. We had snow days where we could go outside and play in the snow and have fun. The school’s would close for an inch of snow. An inch! (Okay inly when it was really slick)
