The Siberian Summer lasts for about 4 days. Siberians don’t buy suntan lotion. They buy helmets for a day at the beach.
Sunbathers in Novosibirsk were caught out by a surprise hailstorm which erupted unexpectedly during an unseasonable heat wave on Saturday. Temperatures in the city had climbed to a high of 37 degrees Celsius, before heavy winds and frozen rain hit the beach along the Ob River. Local reports described the hail stones as being the size of golf balls or chickens’ eggs.
I got caught in a hail storm just like that in Great Falls MT one day. We were about 8-9 years old and my friend and I rode our bikes all the way around the perimeter of Malmstrom Air Force Base stopping off to watch the firefighters practice extinguishing burning aircraft in the fire pit. We were within a few hundred yards of home when the hail storm hit with 1-2 inch hail. I got hit everywhere except the head before diving into an open shed but my friend got hammered. Damn near went deaf taking shelter inside that metal shed!
About 25 years later my wife and I were attending a star party in the mountains south of Great Falls. As soon as we arrived we set up an Easy-Up canopy just in time to avoid 3/4″-1″ size hail that ended up being 3″-4″ deep on the ground! We still had our first Cocker Spaniel with us at the time and she loved eating ice cubes. Dumb dog thought she was in heaven and walked around in the hail storm eating it as fast as she could, seemingly oblivious to the beating she was taking.
We camped there all weekend but the star party was a bust due to clouds and rain so we spent our days in Great Falls visiting the CM Russell museum, Giant Springs and the Lewis & Clark interpretive center. There was still hail on the ground when we headed for home!
@ Indentured Servant
Ah, Montana. Nothing like it.
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Montana didn’t work out so well for Custer. There wasn’t any hail that day. Temp in the 90s.
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For some strange reason sunbathing, and Novosibirsk (capital city of Siberia) seem to be mutually exclusive concepts . . . . (mind you they ARE tough in that part of the year – we complain abuot the pebbles, but they probably find sunbathing on a layer of permafrost just fine!)
Allah says in the Qur’an:
“Do you not see that Allah drives clouds? Then He brings them together, then He makes them into a mass, and you see the rain emerge from within it. And He sends down from the sky, mountains [of clouds] within which is hail, and He strikes with it whom He wills and averts it from whom He wills. The flash of its lightening almost takes away the eyesight”. (Noor: page:355 ///verse 43)