Where in the world am I?
I am in a country where the mass - and seemingly spontaneous - mobilization of labour can still sometimes take effect with a frightening thoroughness (and also a surprising efficiency).
The first year I was here, it snowed almost continuously for the 7 days prior to Christmas. It was the same thin, wet, unlovely snow we're suffering today..... but, over time, it gradually built up to a decent depth on the ground of 8 or 10 inches.
It finally stopped snowing late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve - but that day was brutally cold (one of the coldest I've ever experienced here), so there was no chance that it was going to melt.
Our first year in The Unnameable Country was going to be marked by a White Christmas! My foreign teacher colleagues and I were all quite charmed and excited by this.
There was no way that snow-clearing operations were going to get underway that night, in such extreme sub-zero conditions. And even when, if they did start, there was so much snow, it seemed likely it would take at least 2 or 3 days to clear it up thoroughly - especially when it was frozen so hard. And we expected that, in all probability, they would only attempt to clear the major roads.
Wrong. At the crack of dawn the next morning, the neighbourhood committees across the city initiated a vigorous snow-sweeping program: every man, woman, and child was shovelling away like crazy from 7am...... and by 10am, when the earliest of the hungover foreigners blinked expectantly into the Christmas morn, there was scarcely a speck of snow to be seen anywhere. Our White Christmas had been STOLEN!!
Remarkable. Terrifying. I think 'they' were trying to tell us something..... and it went rather beyond a Grinchly impulse to spoil others' fun.
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