My Winter Warmers
Ishould have been in Switzerland last weekend but had to cancel at the last minute for family reasons. To further indulge my love of train journeys, I was booked to travel on the Glacier Express, the train that runs every day throughout the year from St Moritz to Zermatt (and vice versa). I was starting in St Moritz, embarking at just after 9am and ending up in Zermatt at teatime the same day, after what I hoped would be a breathtakingly beautiful snowscaped journey through the Alps. I was so looking forward to it, and will definitely re-schedule it for another date.
Why was I doing the trip in the depth of winter, some friends wanted to know? It would be absolutely freezing. Way below freezing, actually. Last weekend the temperature in Zermatt was around the -20C mark.
The cold doesn’t bother me when I travel. In fact, in many ways, I prefer it to the heat – certainly to extreme heat which is no fun whatsoever.
What with our own cold snap during the past few weeks and with the extreme conditions that have hit parts of the United States, I have been thinking about the best places that I have visited when it has been very, very cold. Not so cold that you would get frostbite if you poked your nose out through the door, but much colder, all the same, than we ever experience here. But still places where the winter temperatures enhanced, rather than spoiled, the visit.
Three places stand out for me, all cities which offered wonderful winter experiences and all places, incidentally, that I have never visited in the summer when, I imagine, they would all have a very different face to show to the world. But, for me, when I think of Chicago, Vienna, and St Petersburg, it is of cities wrapped in their winter woollies. And I would highly recommend a winter visit to all of them.
CHICAGO
What a wonderful city – my favourite of all the American ones I have seen. We visited here one early January and were warned ahead by a friend who lives there that we were crazy to come at that time of the year. But it was fantastic. Below freezing, yes, but not frost-bite territory. Arriving into the city late at COLD COMFORTS: St Petersburg’s Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, and, right, Chicago in winter night, and staying in a hotel just off ‘The Magnificent Mile’, we strolled down to the water’s edge the next morning for our first glimpse of the vast expanse that is Lake Michigan. It’s quiet along the lakeside in winter, a part of the city that comes alive in a totally different way once summer starts to arrive. I loved the quiet of it, the fact that my focus was on the beauty of the lake rather than what was happening on it.
We were blessed with clear skies that January so the trip up to the 94th floor of the John Hancock Center on North Michigan Avenue (now called 360 Chicago) for the spectacular views from the observation deck certainly didn’t disappoint.
Did it snow? Not really. There were a few flurries, alright, just enough to add to the atmosphere without curtailing our to-ings and fro-ings. And the bowls of warming clam chowder soup (not to mention the oysters and the crab) in Shaw’s Crab House on East Hubbard Street certainly did the trick when it came to fortifying us against the cold.
ST PETERSBURG
It was late November for the St Petersburg visit. And Baltic. Literally. The seriously minus temperatures never let up over the four days we spent there but the clear blue skies on a couple of the days made up for the freezing temperatures. St Petersburg is a city with buildings and squares on a huge scale, but also a colourful city when it comes to many of those landmark buildings. So the famous Hermitage Museum stands out in green, St Nicholas’s Cathedral in vivid blue, the Mikhailovsky Theatre in striking mustard, the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov) in soft turquoise, all of which are only enhanced when set against the blue sky and the white frosty/snowy pavements. And then there’s the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood with its gold and multicoloured onion domes – stunning in a winter streetscape.
That you need to wrap up really warmly in Russia in winter goes without saying, but I loved the city in November. Apart from how it looked, with the colourful buildings, the frost-covered pavements and the frozen canals, it was great to be able to dive indoors every now and again, to drink hot chocolate or steaming coffee and just warm up for a while. One of my strongest memories is actually of my husband’s moustache – if we walked along in silence for more than a couple of minutes, when he then turned to speak to me, tiny icicles cascaded from his moustache!
Nor will I ever forget the image and the sound – of the River Neva as it creaked and groaned itself to a standstill the night we arrived, different slabs of ice-floe crashing into others until the whole river was solid – until the spring. An extraordinary sight.
VIENNA
I’ve only ever been to Vienna in winter and it has always been magical. The very first time was for a November conference and, although I didn’t see much of the city on that occasion, I remember the swirling snow and how beautiful the place looked.
The best visit was in the month of December when it was freezing cold but not actually snowing. We arrived on a Friday evening when Vienna was already cloaked in darkness and made our way to the Christmas market in front of the city hall (there are numerous Christmas market venues in Vienna). Everywhere was covered with a veneer of crispy white frost and, although you had to wrap up well, it was still very pleasant just wandering around, enjoying a mug of gluwein or a hot chocolate.
Apart from the fact that all of Vienna’s gracious buildings, from the Schonbrunn or Hofburg palaces to the Belvedere Museum (with its wonderful array of Klimt paintings), look stunning with such a winter backdrop, the other brilliant thing about visiting the Austrian capital when the weather is very cold is its coffee houses.
In truth, Vienna is probably the best ‘cafe society’ city I have ever visited (with Trieste coming close) and I think it really comes into its own in winter. There’s nothing quite like sitting in Cafe Sacher, amid the comfort of its red velvet interior, drinking that distinctive Viennese coffee – a melange – and peeping out through steamed up windows at the winter wonderland that awaits you once you don coat and hat and scarf and gloves and venture, once again, out into this beautiful winter city.