The Tübingen Weather

by: Patrick Grogan

Before coming to Germany, my mother told me I would have to wear seven layers of clothing to keep warm. For the first three weeks of our stay in Tübingen I laughed when thinking about this seemingly absurd suggestion. However a few days ago while walking around Tübingen I wished I had given her advice a little more consideration. Not only was I cold, but also disappointed as a result of the cancellation of our trip rip to the PUMA factory in Herzogenaurach due to snowed-over roads. Now the snow made my hands turn blue even though I was wearing gloves made for hiking in the Arctic Circle gloves. But back to the first three weeks. Although it was cold, especially for those from the warmer parts of South Africa such as KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo, I, always attired in a thick jacket, did not feel the cold at all. In fact coming from Grahamstown where the weather can be, by South African standards, very cold, my first taste of a European winter seemed comfortably familiar. On activities, such as the hike to Unterjesingen, where previous years’ groups had built snowmen and thrown snowballs at each other, we were met not by threatening clouds, but rather by beautiful blue sky and weak sunshine. After over two weeks of such a, by Southern German standards, mild winterr, we had all but given up on our hopes of seeing snow for the first time. However in the third week the weather became angrier, determined to show us that it had not lost its venom. After a few noticeably colder days where the temperature struggled to rise above five degrees, Barbara announced two things to us. First she advised us to stay inside on a particular Thursday evening due to the passing windstorm Kyrill, which claimed 44 lives throughout Europe. Secondly she promised that we would have snow by the Tuesday of the last week. Although Tübingen was largely unaffected by the storm, Barbara did not let us down with her second promise. On Tuesday 23 January we all awoke to see small white flakes dropping from the sky. They were very small and the ground was not even white. If this was snow, what an anti-climax! However later that day we heard loud thumps on the window which we soon discovered were large snowballs being hurled at us by Stephan. When we looked at the ground there was snow everywhere and it was deep and easy to fall into, a fact to which a group members could testify. We all now had the chance to throw snowballs at each other, hurtle through the snow on sleds, add an hour on to our bus journey back to our residences, and experience something which we might not see again for a long time. I, although excited to see snow for the first time, was, after three days of getting my shoes drenched in it, happy to see it begin melting by the beginning of our last weekend in Tübingen.