A Winter Experience

Hendrick Averkamp, Skaters

I love genre paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists like Pieter Brueghel that show scenes of daily life packed full of people.  From these and other sources, I got the image in my head of skating down canals in the Netherlands and thought it would be wonderful to experience that someday.
Well, it wasn't a canal, but I finally got my wish!
The big man-made lake in Hannover, the Maschsee, occasionally freezes over, but I hadn't expected that this year due to the mild winter.  However, in the cold streak we've had in the past two weeks, the ice froze to at least 13 cm thick, the required amount to allow people on it.
So on Sunday, I became one of the around 150,000 people who ventured to the Maschsee over the weekend.  It was packed and something where everyone came out to enjoy themselves in one way or another.

The scene on our arrival. It clears out some once you're further down.

I ended up ice skating and proudly made it to one side of the lake and back - a 5km roundtrip.  Since the ice was covered with some snow or the shavings from ice skating, it wasn't too slippery to just walk on though, and so you could really do whatever you wanted to.  Sights included: hockey games, curling, wheeling along baby strollers, walking dogs, biking, standing around drinking Glühwein or hot chocolate (there were different vendors set up along the banks), taking a stroll, whirling kids around on sleds, and one of my favorites: clearing a path in the ice and then taking little kids in snow suits and giving them a big push so they would slide along, like a slip-in-slide on ice (image to the right).