Snowmageddon NL

I’ve heard it said that in Texas or California, when the first snowflakes start to fall, every car on the road starts skipping. Whether or not that’s true or not I don’t know, but certainly here in good old Holland, where we pride ourselves on our old fashioned Dutch winters, the first day of snow saw eighthundred kilometers of traffic jams and the complete disarray of the railways. Luckily the metro and buses were still running and I got home with no problems, but I wouldn’t have wanted to travel anywhere outside Amsterdam this weekend…

What amused and annoyed me in equal measures was the reporting in the main news broadcast tonight. First we got a look at the chaos on the road, full with cheerful people stoically commenting on how long it would take them to get home, all accepting that snow in the Netherlands means slippery roads, lower speeds and long long traffic jams. Then we went to the railways and there we only got complaining travellers frustrated about the delays and cancelled trains and how badly the railway people were handling things. Granted, when you’re driving a car you still have some illusion of control while it can be incredibly frustrating when you don’t know when you can travel, how you are going to travel and if you can actually travel in the first place, but the tone of the reporting was meaningful. The same weather that was shown as an act of god in the first item, in the second item was blamed on the railways lack of preparation…