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Friday, February 17, 2012

...on stormy days of real winter

Tel Aviv port on one of stormy winter days
Today is one of those rare stormy days in Israel: it's windy, cold, overcast. Tomorrow it's even supposed to snow on the north of the country and in Jerusalem!

Typical winters in Tel Aviv are very different. They are sunny, dry, outdoorsy. It's so wonderfully weird to look at the pictures from northern countries and see piling snow, ice-covered streams, feeble sun under the frozen land. I really like these images and stories from places where the winter is present, and real, and cannot be ignored or mistaken. I probably like the best those coming from Scandinavia. There's something very magical and severe in Scandinavian winters, and it's beautifully conveyed by photographers, writers, bloggers.

A few months ago I read a novel "The True Deceiver" by Tove Jansson. Tove Jansson is a Finnish-Swedish artist and writer, probably best known by her Moomin series (of which by the way my favorite is "Moominland Midwinter"!), but she had also written wonderful "non-Moomin" prose, such as "The True Deceiver", that only recently had been translated to English. It starts like this:
It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light. <...> It had been snowing along the coast for a month. As far back as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been this much snow, this steady snow piling up against doors and windows and weighing down roofs and never stopping even for an hour. Paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out. <...> People woke up late because there was no longer any morning.
As the title suggests, this book is about trust and deceit, and also about art, and craft, and talent. And it's also about seasons, and how they affect and influence us all. I read "The True Deceiver" when it was warm and sunny, and I could really feel the winter in a cut-out Scandinavian village, where "there was no longer any morning".

Take a look at the Sky watch Friday, to see the sky in Scandinavia, and in the Middle East, and everywhere in the world...

8 comments:

Jidhu Jose said...

nice sky and the waves
happy SWF

Snapshot
Reflections

Tatjana Parkacheva said...

Very nice shot.

Regards and best wishes

sparrow said...

You write very well Olga. Thanks for the book review too. I will look out for this book, which I had never heard of and which sounds intriguing.
Great photo too!. With warm greetings from warm and humid NZ.

Unknown said...

There's beauty in a storm! For you, I hope it died down:)

Kim, USA said...

The water looks rough. I bet it is cold too. ^_^

Happy weekend!
SWF

jewaicious said...

What a beautiful winter capture filled with nice tones and contrasts, and the bits of light peeking through.

Dina said...

I can feel the power of those waves!
I'm enjoying your text too, something we can only imagine. The snow never came to Jerusalem today.

Anonymous said...

please contact me at 5217853 or enoch-maoz_y@tel-aviv.gov.il

I am from Tel Aviv Yafo Municipality - I'd like to co-operate

All the best,

Yael