Life in Ciudad Rodrigo

It's hardly the motorway closing, chaos causing snow that has been so common in Northern Spain this winter but it is, definitely, snow on this Monday morning in Ciudad Rodrigo. The picture is taken from our living room. The building is the Santa Clara Convent where, so far as I know, the nuns live a life without modern conveniences like electricity. One of their hobbies is ringing the convent bell. They sell biscuits and keep sheep too. The sheep go baaah-baaah which isn't a noise usually associated with an urban environment so that it rather took me aback the first time I heard it drifting through the flat.

It's bitter, it's perishing, it's icy, it's freezing, it's horrid - over the past week I've been able to use these as topical English expressions for the students I teach because it has indeed been bitter, perishing and icy here in Ciudad Rodrigo. The thermometer on the chemist's may read a toasty -1ºC but it has been minus a few degrees overnight and it really has felt excruciatingly cold. But we've been getting off lightly. Temperatures in Soria yesterday were -9ºC and it was -6ºC in Salamanca capital. Not warm. Madrid Airport was closed for five hours because of the snow and the telly was full of stories of people trapped in cars for hours on end on the motorways in and out of Madrid. In fact most of Spain has had snow including normally mild places like Murcia and coastal Andalucia. There was even a light dusting in Culebrón according to some friends and the water pipes of our house there froze. Now who was it who was explaining to me that the reaso...