Whenever I tell people that I’m studying abroad in England, the first thing they often lament is the awful weather. It’s so rainy! Pack your rain boots! You’ll freeze! The sun will never come out! Here I was thinking that the streets of Oxford would constantly be flooding and my sneakers would be soaking wet every morning as I walked to lecture. Fortunately, that is definitely not the case!
While winter has certainly been grayer and wetter than autumn thus far, it isn’t nearly as cold as I expected. Over winter break back in the States, we got over a foot of snow where I live in New Hampshire. After wearing puffy winter coats, shoveling the driveway every few hours, and enduring temperatures close to zero degrees Fahrenheit, winter in England hardly feels like winter at all. The temperature tends to hover somewhere around forty or forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, making it feel more like March than January. And there are birds singing outside my bedroom window?!?! What season is it??
There are even miraculous days of sunny blue skies to break up the gray monotony every once in a while. It feels strange to walk around and see green grass in the middle of January… where is all the snow? Where is all the slush? The shovels? The plows? It’s quite nice to not have to worry about walking in the snow; however, I know that if I hadn’t gone home to so much snow over break I would have really missed it. Winter just doesn’t feel the same without a foot of snow to trudge through!
Even Michaelmas term wasn’t as rainy, cold, or gray as people told me it would be. To be honest, I don’t really mind the weather in England, or at least the weather in Oxford. It’s so mild compared to the wild seasons of New Hampshire!
Click here to check out other posts in my Holly Goes Abroad series!
What is winter like where you live? Do you get a lot of snow? What’s your favorite season? Let me know in the comments section below!
Yours,
HOLLY
nut free nerd 
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