Snowball Fight!

Snoooooowball Fight!

What a beautiful 3 am. Snow like this makes me glad it's winter; at least it does in the dead of night when it's all still fluffy and dry and beautiful, and the streets are empty and quiet - save for the gentle, almost imperceptible tinkle of snow falling on snow, and the low moaning of drunk clubbers traipsing through the streets like frozen zombies, searching for a cab.

Which brings me to my point: snowplows. Amazing contraptions, really. Imagine! An iron horse with the road clearing ability of a thousand PLA soldiers! For a city that has the ability to orchestrate its weather, it seems to have lacked the foresight to actually prepare for it.

Last night, 15-second rolls of thunder echoed over the far off cackle of a mad scientist as magic snow fell from the sky – and the roads turned to death traps. A good ten inches sat across Gongti Bei Lu as I treaded home like an excited, yet grouchy, polar bear, the rare car inching along at about 5km an hour. Gongti was reduced to one squirrelly line of tracks meandering down the middle of its normal 4 lanes of traffic.

This was made worse by dozens of kids pouring out of nightclubs, wandering around right in the middle of the road, approaching moving cars as if the snow had knocked the common sense right out of them. Hello, people: I know you’ve been drinking but these are CARS, and they are trying very hard not to loose control, and if they HIT YOU, it will HURT.

Unfortunately, the city cannot be held responsible for the drunken masses outside the front gate of Gongti at 3am.

It can, however, be responsible for its roads. Any accident that took place last night is blood on city officials hands. I did see salt trucks, devoid of plows, spraying loads of salt over the snow – what, is the plan to melt 10 inches of snow into a salty, briny slush-ice combo, and drive over that?

That’s not how it's done, people. First, the snow must be removed from the road, with the use of a snowplow. Then, the asphalt must get salted in order to keep it from icing over. Granted, I come from a town full of steep hills where it snows for about 8 months of the year – so it strikes me as lunacy that this isn’t common sense to the rest of the world, and I apologize (only semi-sarcastically) if this comes off as rude and patronizing – but good lord! Come on, Beijing. Just because the snow is going to melt soon does not mean its ok to turn the entire city into a serious safety hazard.

The only upside of our city’s lack of preparation goes out to all the kids who can really appreciate it – that’s right young bloods, forget about school – it’s a SNOW DAY!