My general color association with the sky in this region is gray — a mix of dark gray and light gray, a whole palette of grays. Some days, the sky was a solid, single gray. Other days, there were lower gray clouds with higher clouds of a lighter gray. But no matter what shade of gray, there was one thing in common: the sun was invisible. Hidden. Nonexistent.
For the first few days here, the sky was blue, the sun was out, and I actually found myself thinking from time to time, “Wow, it’s actually almost hot.”
But of course it wasn’t to last. For the last week or so, the gray has returned (with the exception of a couple of hours yesterday morning), the temperatures have dropped: the Polish weather I loathed has finally arrived.
Though I agree in principle — my girls and I spent a week in Zakopane bundled in woolies — this time I think we need to look broadly at what’s happening in all of Europe. Paris yesterday morning — 40 degrees F. All of northern Europe: rain, almost without interruption, for months. And actually, that parallels what’s been happening in the States, at least in the Midwest — the coldest, wettest, grayest spring in history. With violent storms thrown in. At least you don’t have the violent storms!
So given the fact that this is a fairly common occurrence in Poland (I can’t remember a summer out of the seven I was here that we didn’t have at least some period of time like this, and the winter weather was almost without exception gray), we could say that it is now as exceptionally cold in Western Europe as it is unexceptionally cold in Poland.